'von', 'van', 'de' in author's name appear as 'Von', 'Van', 'De'

2
  • Yep, that's also covered.
  • Another I missed: "ca."
  • edited April 26, 2013
    OK, I'm having similar issues with Dutch names that use particles. The way I want everything to work is this:

    Citations:
    (Van Blumenthal 2001, Van der Veen 2012)

    Bibliography:
    Blumenthal, A. van. 2001. TITLE, etc.
    Veen, Hjerre Gjerrits van der. 2012. TITLE, etc.

    That is to say in citations all particles should be placed before the "main" last name with the first particle being capitalized.
    Whereas in the Bib. at the end, the list should be sorted by the "main" last name and the particles should be lower-cased and appended after the first name.

    It would also be great, if the various views in Zotero followed this rule, so when I'm viewing all of my sources, they are ordered/formatted like the Bib. So if I'm looking for the Van Blumenthal 2001 source, I only need to look in the B's for Blumenthal. AFAIK, this is the standard way of doing Dutch names with particles (at least that's how I've been doing it for years now).

    With EndNote, I always edited each citation by hand and manually appended the capitalized particle(s). I realize this is less than ideal, but it was the only way to do it. The question is, how do I get Zotero to do this for me automatically? Or if it's just not possible (as in EndNote), how do I manually do this in Zotero? E.g. if I have two sources in a single citation and the second one is the Blumenthal example. How do I insert a capitalized "Van" manually before only that source?

    (Jansen 2010, Blumenthal 2001) --> (Jansen 2010, Van Blumenthal 2001)

    Thanks for any help you can provide!
    Mike
  • the sorting can be specified in the citation style, which one are you using? If you have documentation that this should always be the case we can fix it generally, otherwise I can tell you what to do in your local copy.
  • Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics Journals
  • Hmmm... I'm not sure about documentation for this. My advisor always told me to do it this way and it seems that other things I've looked at hold to this, but I haven't seen it actually documented anywhere - as in the MLA manual for example. I'll look into it...
  • Well, the Unified style sheet does mention this rule, but I only see it's application in the Bib. I don't see where they talk about the citations themselves. Though I know the peeps that developed the standard and I could easily ask them about it...

    http://celxj.org/downloads/USS-NoComments.pdf

    I think this rule applies more generally for Dutch though. I'm not sure how good your Dutch is, but here's something I quickly found online that follows the pattern I laid out above. It's informing students how to apply the Harvard style in their papers:

    http://www.progeo.nl/files/Harvard.pdf

    In Dutch these particles are called 'Tussenvoegsels' - see that section on page 1 for citations. And for the Bib., look on p. 4 in the 'Algemeen' section - it's the 4th bullet point down. I've always thought this was THE standard way to do it...
  • Rule no. 12 in your document is good enough for me. This should work better, now.
    (you should enter the name as "van Blumenthal, Julia" in Zotero.)

    You'll still get the "van" lowercased in the citation, though.

    And if you check the first post, this is how it's required by many styles - the Tussenvoegsels are the exception and I don't think we've come up with a good way to solve that.
  • I updated my styles and it's working fine (except the lowercased tussenvoegsel, as you mentioned). If/When there is a solution for this, will you post it to this forum, so I know it's out?

    Thank you so much for your help!
    Mike
  • yes, I'll post here - right now that's unfortunately more "if" than "when" - if we agree on a viable solution, Frank should be able to implement that pretty easily.
  • edited April 26, 2013
    This is getting interesting. :-) It looks like CSL is between a rock and a hard place on capitalization of name particles, with requests it both directions.

    I guess the question now would be whether the choice to capitalize in citations is style-dependent, source-language-dependent, or a matter of the preference/culture/language domain of the person cited?
  • My suspicion is that its the latter. I've seen both "Van" and "van" in Cambridge U Press volumes following Chicago style.
    In this case the only way to this would be via different data entry (something like capitalize Tuseenvoegsels on entry), but that, too, seems problematic.
  • @fbennett, if it's not too much to ask, could you sum up how Zotero/citeproc-js currently:

    - parses name fields from Zotero's two-field entries
    - formats the extracted name fields in in-text citations and bibliographic entries, beyond what's discussed in the spec

    I have trouble to keep this all straight.
  • Just an FYI... The workaround for this is to add any particles to the end of the first name in lowercase. Then, you need to be sure and manually append the capitalized particle to the front of any new citations as you add them. This is error-prone but it gets the job done and it's what I've had to do for years with EndNote.

    Also, for reference, it might be helpful to look at TEI's handling of names - they have a field called <nameLink> that holds the particle. Would this be possible for Zotero? So, if the field is filled-in, the bibliography and citations would be handled the Dutch way, otherwise they'd be handled the "normal" way. Food for thought...
  • Rintze: I agree, this would be a good idea. I'll try to put a document together as a magnet for rotten tomatoes.
  • Hi, is there any news on this?

    van Bloemendaal, Julia (in Zotero), which gets rendered as 'Bloemendaal, Julia van' or as 'Julia van Bloemendaal' in the bibliography - all fine. But in the text it definitely has to be '(Van Bloemendaal 2004)', at least for Dutch names. German names behave different '(von Blumenthal 2004)' is okay.
    By the way - just to make it more complicated: there is a difference between Dutch names and Belgium names. In Belgium, the 'Van' or 'De' are always spelled with a capital ('Hans De Velde'). But this could easily be done by entering 'De Velde, Hans' into Zotero, I think.

    Best, Matthias
  • Just experienced this myself. Working with this paper in APA 6th:

    de Kadt, E. (1992). Politeness phenomena in South African black English. Pragmatics and Language Learning, 3, 103–116.

    Author field in Zotero is "de Kadt" for last name and "Elizabeth" for first name. Zotero inserts this in-text as "de Kadt, 1992" (correctly), but inserts it into the reference list as

    De Kadt, E. (1992). Politeness phenomena in South African black English. Pragmatics and Language Learning, 3, 103–116. (incorrectly capitalizing the d).

    Any fix for this other manually changing it?
  • No fix for this currently sorry.

    (For reference: APA is explicit about not uppercasing particles:
    http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/02/how-to-capitalize-author-names-in-apa-style.html
    Chicago doesn't have anything for ref lists, but does not capitalize in index and I found the same rule - don't capitalize particles that are usually lowercased - here:
    http://www.scholarlypress.si.edu/SISP_Guide_Author-Date.pdf which is based on Chicago. None of that solves the "van" issue, though)
  • adamsmith,

    Right, I just prefer to keep things as they originally are. The original citation (or the most original I can find, anyway, it was listed as "de Kadt", so I feel that it should probably stay that way, although it's a minor issue at best.

    It is odd, however, that Zotero inserts it as "de Kadt" in text but as "De Kadt" in the references. Why the difference? In text, it is one of several citations, and it's not the middle, so perhaps Zotero feels like its not a first-word capitalization, but this would be different in the reference list.
  • Zotero capitalizes the first letter of every reference list entry, hence the difference. I'm not sure if that's a good rule--APA and Chicago seem to suggest it isn't--but I'm sure with only a little searching we could find style examples that actually do require it
    (e.g. both APA and Chicago would write "De Kadt" at the beginning of a sentence, it's not far fetched for other styles to extend that rule to references.)
  • edited June 25, 2015
    I've recently bumped into this problem, and I was wondering whether it was already solved in MLZ.

    Just so everyone understand the same thing, let us use these three examples:

    Julia von Blumenthal (German)
    Hans van Neelen (Dutch)
    Jan Vander Maele (Belgian)

    If the names are used without the first name of the author (assuming they're all from 2002), they should be rendered as such (see source at the end):

    (Blumenthal 2002)
    (Van Neelen 2002); the first letter of Dutch "tussenvoegsels" are always capitalised if it is not preceded by the first name/initial of the person
    (Vander Maele 2002)

    If you sort them in the bibliography, they should be in the following order:

    Blumenthal, Julia von (2002)
    Van Neelen, Hans (2002); again, since the name particle is not preceded by the first name, it has to be capitalised [alternatively, you can produce Neelen, Hans van (2002), in which case the name particle would not be capitalised]
    Vander Maele, Jan (2002); here is where the Belgian names differ from the Dutch, since Jan Vander Maele has to sorted under 'V', whereas Hans van Neelen is to be sorted under 'N'

    For the German names, I believe the 'von' could easily be placed as a dropping particle, since it should be dropped anyway when refering to the author only by his/her surname.

    The problem is with the Dutch/Belgian surnames. Ideally, in MLZ (with the flag demote-non-dropping-particle="sort-only" on), it should make an exception for Belgian surnames (so to never demote Belgian non-dropping particles). Another option could be that MLZ only considers parts of the surnames as non-dropping particles if they are entered in lowercase (and thereby skipping over Belgian surnames/non-dropping particles, especially in sorting).

    I wondered whether this could be solved by the locale/language attribute of the reference, but would it lead to problems with for example this publication, with both Dutch and Belgian editors (ignore the style, it's a specific style of a particular publication)?

    G.J.C. Essers, A.P. van der Mei and F. Van Overmeiren (eds) (2012), Vrij verkeer van personen in 60 arresten. De zegeningen van het Europees burgerschap [Free Movement of Persons in 60 Rulings. The Blessings of the European Citizenship], PS Special No. 1, Deventer: Kluwer.

    A.P. van der Mei (and G.J.C. Essers) are Dutch, while F. Van Overmeiren is Belgian. So, unless MLZ also allows you to treat each individual author under a separate locale (for example by a macro), at least one of the names would be distorted.

    I'm not sure if APA/MLA/Chicago/Harvard/etc. dictate otherwise, since they may just treat all surnames under English naming conventions. However, I often have to publish for Dutch-language journals with their own stylesheets.

    Hopefully I've made most of this confusion clearer.

    Sources:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_name#Tussenvoegsels

    http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2011/08/10/referencing-dutch-flemish-german-names-in-the-harvard-system/

    P.S. This is my first comment, so I hope I haven't broken any discussion rules here (e.g. reviving dead threads).
  • Hmm. MLZ doesn't do anything special with item- or field-specific locale tags when rendering names, but I suppose it could do, if a full set of data were compiled. I can't promise to move on it soon, but I'll put it on the list.
  • edited June 25, 2015
    I have the same problem:
    the first letter of each bibliographic item in the bibliography is always automatically capitalized, even if it is the first letter of the surname of the fist author of the bibliographic item (in the citation styles that put the surname before the name). However, if the surname starts with a lower-case letter, I do not want it to be modified: how can I disable the capitalization?
    This article is an example:
    http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/odps.2015.1.issue-1/odps-2014-0001/odps-2014-0001.xml
    "de Vito, G." becomes "De Vito, G."
    I've tried both in Microsoft Word 2007 and in LibreOffice Writer and I have tried with several citation styles (that put the surname before the name) and the result is the same.
    What can I do to solve this issue?

    gdv87


    p.s. I created a new discussion with this message before I realized that this question was already posted here. Therefore now I would like to delete my discussion (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/50199/lowercase-first-letter-of-the-surname/) to avoid duplication but I don't know how to do it.
  • gdv -- no, let's keep your issue in your original thread. The topic here is considerably more complicated given the various capitalization requirements for different languages and depending on the position of the particle.
    A complete solution would probably take care of your issue, too, but what you want is significantly less complex and we'll likely be able to get that right long before we'll get Dutch and Dutch-style names right in general (which I'm not sure will ever be the case).
  • @talk2chun: Have you tried wrapping the family name field content in double quotes, i.e.,
    "Vander Maele"
    ? When I last looked this made citeproc-js parse this as a multipart family name without splitting off any particles, and this – correct me if I’m wrong – seems to be exactly what is required for Belgian names.

    See http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/citeproc-doc.html#particles-as-part-of-the-last-name.

    @fbennett: Did you get a chance to document citeproc-js’s name-parsing algorithm yet?
  • Not yet. I'm afraid I'm locked in a race against time to reimplement the megabyte of patches that is MLZ against the upcoming Zotero 5.0 master. I'll be able to work on a doc after I have a version of the client ready for the switch to API sync.
  • The trick of wrapping the family name field content in double quotes actually worked for me. Thanks!
    GdV87
  • Hi
    I am struggling with a similar problem in with the bibliography of Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Science (http://www.ojvr.org/index.php/ojvr/pages/view/original) (Based on Harvard: http://openjournals.net/files/Ref/HARVARD2009%20Reference%20guide.pdf).

    As OJVS is a South African Journal, the rules on filing order of surnames in the bibliography should probably follow Afrikaans rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_%28Dutch%29#Collation_and_capitalisation .

    For example, the first author of publications are currently ordered in the bibliography as "Simmons", then "Van Sittert" and then "Skinner". In Afrikaans this would be filed as "Simmons", then "Skinner" and then "Van Sittert".

    How can I change this in Zotero?
  • What CSL style file are you using? Try one that has “demote-non-dropping-particle="never"” in line 2, OR try wrapping "Van Sittert" in double quotes, OR wait until case-sensitive parsing (which will stop parsing upper-case elements as particles) is implemented (see https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/30974/2/any-idea-why-an-a-author-comes-last-in-the-bibliography/#Item_31).
  • Thank you nickbart

    "demote-non-dropping-particle="never" didn't work, but wrapping the surname did!

    Thanks again!
    Brand
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