Advanced (field level) disambiguation

pauli · December 13, 2015

I am working on a German legal citation style (with footnotes).
In that style I would like to add disambiguation information selectively.

I guess the best way to achieve my goals would be a field based level of disambiguation.

The following are some of my goals:

(1)
The base citation for book and theses is just [author short (last name)] + [locator].

(2)
The first name of the author [author long] should appear if there are text of two authors with the same last name cited.

(3)
The [title (short form)] of the book/thesis should appear when
(3.1) there are more than one books of the same author (last name and first name) cited or
(3.2) the same author (first and last name) is also cited with a journal article.

(4)
The edition should only appear if there are two books with the same author (first and last name) and title cited.
Preferably the edition info should only appear for the older edition.

(5)
The volume should only appear if there are two or more volumes of the same book (author, title, edition) cited.

I take it that such disambiguation rules are currently not possible with CSL/Zotero?

fbennett · December 13, 2015

The CSL processor that runs in Zotero (citeproc-js) supports incremental disambiguation (see this test fixture for an example). The processor assumes that the elements added by the disambiguate="true" condition are to be added in priority sequence, from left to right (assuming an LTR locale).

pauli · December 13, 2015

Thanks FBennett for your quick answer. Incremental disambiguation is helpful but not quite what I seem to need.

1)
I would like to add the disambiguating element depending on what fields differ.
If for example an older edition is cited I would like the disambiguating element to not be the title but only the edition. One could say I would like to have alternative disambiguation instead of incremental disambiguation.

2)
And for some citations I would like to exclude some parts of the citation from the disambiguation test. For example I have one author who wrote a journal article and a book. The journal article is always cited with [author name], [journal abbreviation], [year] and [first page].
The disambiguation test for the book will result in "false" because the book is cited [author name], [title if disambiguate="true"]. Thus the book will be cited just with the [author name] without additional information, because it differs from the cite with the additional journal info.
But I would like to add the book title in this case because readers might confuse the cite with just the author name with the journal article.

I hope I could explain what I mean.

adamsmith · December 13, 2015

I'm very skeptical here. We'd be adding a lot of complexity in syntax with very high maintenance costs for something that hasn't come up once in the last 8 years.

fbennett · December 13, 2015

@pauli: Your explanation is clear; I read your first post in haste. As adamsmith says, we have not encountered such a set of requirements before, and automating the rules you propose would be hard to do. You might be able to achieve these effects with incremental disambiguation and complex conditions, but I (too) would strongly warn against attempting it. Even if it is possible, it is unlikely to work well.