Multiple publications with same author & year: Order of 'a' and 'b' citations

cc15
Hi,

I have recently started using Zotero and find that when I insert citations for two publications by the same author in the same year in Word, Zotero adds a suffix 'a' and 'b' e.g. Smith 2000a. This is fine, but the problem I have is that I think the letters are affixed according to the title of the publication, i.e. whichever is alphabetically first receives 'a'. In my document, this means that Smith 2000b comes before Smith 2000a (not in the same citation, but separated by several pages). I would like to change this so that 'a', 'b' etc. are assigned according to whichever publication is first cited, so that they are always in the order 'a', 'b', 'c' etc.

Is there a way to do this? Many thanks for any help.
  • adamsmith
    the letters are assigned according to the order in which the two items appear in the bibliography and presumably that is sorting for title as a tertiary sort condition (after author and date). You could likely modify the style for this to no longer be the case, but are you sure that'd be correct given the style you're using?
  • cc15
    I'm using my University department's style which unfortunately doesn't conform exactly to any existing ones so I have had to make amendments to the Harvard system to make it work. Do you know how I would modify the 'a'/'b' setting to work as desired? I can't seem to find a suitable option when I've looked in the CSL editor online.
  • adamsmith
    hard to say without seeing the style, but basically you'd want to take out the sort condition from the bibliography that sorts by title.

    It'll looks something like


    <sort>
    ...
    ...
    <key macro="title"/>
    </sort>
    and you want to delete the
    <key macro="title"/>
    line.
  • cc15
    Thank you! That's worked perfectly.
  • Matthieu Renault
    I've passed 3 hours on this trouble. And adam smith went through there, and, thanks to his invisible hand, solved it. I thank you as well, 3 years later.

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