BCE dates?

zachbb
Over the years, there has been a lot of discussion about including BCE dates in Zotero. Is there currently a fix for this or a way of adding BCE dates?

I have tried 500BC, 500 BC, 500 BCE, 500BCE, -500. None of them work.
  • zork
    It would be useful to have dates like 380 BCE sort properly.
  • zork
    edited October 30, 2014
    I have just realized that the problem is worse! I enter for the sake of argument:

    @book{plato_republic_380bce,
    address = {Athens},
    title = {The Republic},
    author = {{Plato}},
    year = {380BCE}
    }
    But in MS word with Chicago (author-date) the citation comes out (Plato 380AD), who on earth expected that!
    The bibliography gives:
    Plato. The Republic. Athens, 380AD.

    This is just plain wrong.
  • aurimas
    Zotero does not currently handle BCE dates (it assumes all dates are AD), but perhaps in the future. In general though, I think the reply here is pretty spot on: http://tex.aspcode.net/view/635399273629833626243670/biblatex-date-fields-bc
  • zork
    I understand the point raised, although in my case it also feels a bit strange to give the Penguin edition's date. My motivation for using the BCE date is to emphasize the ancient provenance of the view.

    However is seems simply perverse to change a date entered as 380 BC or whatever into saying explicitly "AD" (and notice it is not "CE")! After all it does not add AD to "normal" dates.
  • adamsmith
    clearly this is odd and it's likely the result of not fully implemented date parsing for ancient dates gone awry.
    AD/BC vs BCE/CE is defined in the terms of a citation style, so could be toggled there, though that's a secondary issue.

    According to standard style guides, you'd indeed either cite classical works without date or you would cite the date for the edition of the work you're using. APA does allow you to include the original date of publication such as in this comment: http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/12/happy-holiday-citing-citation-of-classical-works.html#comment-6a01157041f4e3970b0147e114ac73970b
    but since we don't even have a field for that, that's kind of moot right now.

    You can force literal pass through for dates using _35 BCE (i.e. an underscore at the beginning) though I don't think that'll necessarily export nicely and I have no idea what it does on sorting. The underscore will be included in the text, you'd have to take that out at the end.

    Generally we'll want ancient dates to work, I'd assume we'll fix that when other issues with the date field (such as the inability to enter uncertain dates or date ranges) are addressed.
  • fbennett
    (What is happening is that the "BCE" is getting stripped, so the processor sees "380". It adds the discriminator because the year is close to the boundary.)
  • adamsmith
    Frank - citeproc would understand -380, right? The issue is that Zotero doesn't pass that on?
  • fbennett
    Yes. I think it will even recognize the "BCE" if it reaches the parser.
  • Julia_Friedrich
    I tried BC350, that worked out !
  • emilianoeheyns
    Wouldn't original-date: 380BCE in the extra field get the date to the processor unchanged?
  • bwiernik
    Yes
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