Automatically suppressing year and parentheses in citation?

buttonsrtoys · February 28, 2017

I'm evaluating Zotero for my MS Word book manuscript and want to follow APA guidelines with the exception of suppressing parentheses for all citations and the year for citations with only author groups that only have one publication. I.e., if I only list one publication in my bibliography for Smith & Jones, I don't want to show the year. If Smith & Jones have more than one publication in my bibliography, I want to list the year to eliminate ambiguity.

I know I can manually override this at each citation, but can it be automated? Alternatively, if could specify this at the bibliography level, so that I could format all citations of a single source, that would be acceptable.

adamsmith · February 28, 2017

Yes, both can be done in a custom citation style. Removing the parentheses is fairly trivial; the year thing is more complex -- have you looked at editing citation styles at all?
https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step

buttonsrtoys · February 28, 2017

Thanks Adam. Yes, I looked into customizing citations a bit, but haven't come across people doing what I like with conditionally displaying the year of publication, which is why I posted.

adamsmith · February 28, 2017

you'll want to look at <if disambiguate="true">. The MLA style could be a good model. It adds the short title where you have more than 1 citation by an author/group of authors. You can use the exact same construct, but use it to print the year in those cases.

buttonsrtoys · February 28, 2017

Perfect! Thanks!