supress the author

lchen
Zotero now provides an option "Suppress Author" for some in-text citations when I need, for example, Young et al. (2001) instead of (Young et al. 2001), which requires manually adding the author for the citation. But this is not convenient when I change the reference style. For example, some journals require the authors' name be italic, while some require normal font. If I change the reference style between these journal styles, I need to manually change the font for authors. That will be a pain. I think it will be much more useful if Zotero provides an option such as "Place the Author outside the parentheses", so we don't need to manually add author for citations.
  • aurimas
    Extensive discussion is available here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5282/multiple-intext-citation-patterns/

    TL;DR: main issue with this is switching between author-date and numeric styles and the part where formatting within a citation is different from formatting of author names in text (as you have suggested above).

    The latter issue would require defining additional formatting of author names outside of parenthetical citations (at least for styles that have different requirements for each), which would take a lot of work.

    The former part could be fixed as well, given that the solution above is implemented. I.e. for _all_ numeric styles we would have to define how to format author names in text, which is even more work.

    For me, the biggest argument against needing to go through all of this effort is that author names, in these cases, are essential parts of the sentence and should be independent of citations. Some names are difficult to type out and Zotero may be able to assist there (e.g. a keyboard shortcut to pull in plain-text names from Zotero database), but I feel like the benefits are marginal compared to copy-paste.
  • lchen
    Maybe I underestimated the programming work underlying the issue, but I think if you can insert a field in MS word (or other word processors) to generate a citation, it would not be very difficult to change the place of author name (in or out of parentheses) and add a little extra formatting. I should say the benefit is not marginal. Look how many people care about it. Is that really hard? Do you need to do it separately for each style?
  • aurimas
    edited June 19, 2014
    Yes, each style would require defining the formatting for author names outside of parentheses (there could be an agreed-upon default). Unless I'm overlooking something, this may be doable, but it needs to be agreed on in CSL and citeproc-js (both projects are used by multiple software other than Zotero) and then we can add it to Zotero. So in short, this would take a long time.

    Edit: also, knowing CSL's general policy on feature additions, this would probably not pass
  • adamsmith
    sorry, but you're not addressing any of the concerns raised in the other thread and by Aurimas here. We've spent a lot of time on this discussion and I completely understand you don't want to spend the time reading up on it, but that also means that this isn't going to lead anywhere.
  • lchen
    Aurimas - I believe it is not necessary to define the formatting for author names outside of parentheses. Journals I have seen distinguish the author name format from the rest of the sentence. In other words, author names have the same format regardless of their place, in or out of the parentheses. This makes sense to me - the citation is easy to identify. It will ease the problem - at least for the author-date format, i.e., if you provide the option of author name out of parentheses, you only need to move the location of the parentheses and do not need to change anything else - that's my expectation. Hope it can be done.
  • aurimas
    From adamsmith in the linked thread
    The usage-scenario were authors in grammatical citations need to follow a certain style - the main argument for changing the current solution - is very murky, because there are just as many styles that don't want, e.g. an ampersand in the text, but do want it in the citation
    - i.e. Smith and Meyer (2001) argue, but (Smith & Meyer 2001).
Sign In or Register to comment.