Author [1] for citation instead of [1] or Author (Year) for citation instead of (Author Year)

kia2543 · January 30, 2017

Hi everyone!
I have used EndNote to manage my references. Unfortunately, I have to work with Zotero in my new research.
I read the comments and I couldn’t find my solution.
The problem is that there is not an automatic citations in Zotero. Sometimes you have to use Author (Year) for citation instead of (Author Year). The comments said that “In Zotero you can get the letter by writing out the author in the word processor and then using supress author to just print the year in parentheses”. It is tedious and boring and unusual approach for a citing Software! It is applicable for small sizes not for a research including many references.
I hope that this weakness will be solved in the new version.

Regards,
Kiarash.

bwiernik · January 30, 2017

Currently, suppressing the author and typing it manually is the only way to get such formats. It is actually quite challenging to support such formats, as every style would need to have an extra set of citation formats (e.g., APA style requires "and" for in-text author lists, but "&" for in-parentheses author lists), and there are many variations on formatting that Zotero would need to accommodate in some way (e.g., listing all of the authors, "Author et al.", "Author and colleagues", etc.). Better support for such formats in Zotero (and other CSL-based citation software, such as Mendeley and Papers) is planned, but no ETA on when it will be available.

HThole · January 30, 2017

One thought about this:

You could work with Zotero as it is by now. When your work is finished, you detach alle fields (like you do with any other citation-manager) and have a plain text with all the in-text citations in the format (Author YYYY).

Then you perform a search and replace in e.g. Word saying

search for the string "left parenthesis with any number of letters followed by a blank" and

replace it with "the found number of letters (=the Author's Name) followed by a blank and a left parenthesis".

Word should be able to detect the authors Name as it always will be between the left parenthesis an the blank. Word is able to leave a part of the string untouched when replacing it, I think.

It will be a little bit tricky the find the right search-rule in word, but it should work.

By doing so, you can work with Zotero, and you only have to do your work for the needed replacement once.

You will be able to try, if this works.

A t the very end it is inacceptable to have such a number of different styles for citations. We are livin in a electronic world, and having hundreds of different styles is so out of time that no one can tell why this has to be so.

LiborA · January 30, 2017

@kia2543 Hi Kiarash, it is not any problem to prepare style which will create the citation in the format "Author (year)" instead of "(Author year)" or "Author [1]" instead of "[1]". But if you need this unusual approach only sometimes in your paper you have to use tools available in the Zotero. I do not know, what is "automatic citation" in EndNote (I used EndNote only a few months a lot of years ago), but I think, that the standard procedures are very similar in both systems.

HThole · January 30, 2017

@LiborA How do you do that?

LiborA · January 30, 2017

@HThole you can define each part of style output (http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#styles-structure). For example "Author [1]" will be defined in citation element by variables "author" and "citation-number"

bwiernik · January 30, 2017

LiborA's suggestion is either-or. CSL cannot currently support both (Author Year) and Author (Year) in the same document at the same time, so it's not a generally very useful approach to write an Author (Year) style.

HThole · January 30, 2017

Thanks for the information.

I still wonder where the REAL difference is in writing
(Author YYYY) or Author (YYYY) - it's a kind of sophisticated nonsense.

Writing the Authors Name in the Text is kind, writing only the cite's number isn't consuming so much space, both is possible, except for the parenthesis.

A publisher could want you to write the Author's Name in Italic or the Year BOLD or Italic & Bold or any other kind of kidding around - that's somehow ridicolous!

It would be a great thing if all journals could define the same inline citation-rules, at least two types (Author - Year) or [Number], depending of the need to fullfill the wordcount - could be worth a Petition!