Adding citations in word without parentheses

I need to add citations that are not enclosed in parentheses to a table in a word document. The table is part of a larger text document that has parenthetical citations throughout so I can not change the style of the document to one without parenthetical citations.

For example:

Climate change is occurring at an increasing rate (Gore et al. 2009). Blah blah blah...lots more text and citations followed by a table.

Species Behavioral Change Reference
Polar Bear Swims longer distances Smith et al. 2012

I would like to cite "Smith et al. 2012" in the table instead of "(Smith et al. 2012)." I've tried manually deleting the parentheses and saving the word document. But citations keep updating automatically and reverting back to "(Smith et al. 2012)." Is there any way to remove the parentheses from some, but not all citations in a document?

Thank you!
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  • which Word processor?
  • As a slight alternative, would Smith et al. (2012) be acceptable? If so, typing Smithc et al. in your word processor, then inserting the reference with Suppress Author, will work.
  • Hi. Thank you for your responses. I'm working in MS Word 2007. I need to have the citations formatted without any parentheses in the table so the Suppress Author function won't quite do the trick. Other suggestions?

    If there is no way to completely remove the parentheses from the citations I will type them in the table and then manually edit my bibliography to include those citations.
  • I thought in Word, if you change the citation in the text in Word the changes would stick - that's not the case?
    In that case, switch to the classic view,
    http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage#switching_to_the_classic_view
    use "Show Editor" and remove the parentheses there. The citations won't update any more, but they'll be included in the bibliography.
  • To follow up on this, I would greatly appreciate, if you could include an option like this in an update of zotero! Something like "suppress parantheses" in addition to "suppress authors". Thank you!
  • I wholeheartedly agree with tomka's comment.
  • Hey there,

    is there any upgrade planned in this direction? And may I add another wish for a very desperately (!) needed citation option? :)

    But in our papers it is very common to not only write "blablabla (Smith & Myers, 2001)", but as well "Smith and Myers (2001) say blablabla". I know, that there is the option to suppress authors, but there are two big disadvantages with that:

    1) you have to type in the authors names by hand every time and along with that and more important
    2) there are rules for papers with more than one author that need to be taken into consideration (e.g. mentioning all 3 authors the first time and only the first author et al. after that). With the current option to supress authors, one needs to check those rules by hand for every paper, every time.

    Before switching to Zotero I used Citavi and there was the option to choose between "(Smith, 2001)" or "Smith (2001)". This way the Smith in Smith (2001) was a reference in the text as well....

    I hope it is clear what I am talking about.... :)

    I am looking forward to hearing from you, if that is maybe possible in an upgrade or if there is any option to do this in Zotero even at the moment!

    Thanks in advance!

    Elisabeth
  • At the moment, the best way to accomplish this is to manually type the author names in your document and use the "Supress Author" option to get just the year in parentheses. There is a general intention to automate the formatting of "Author (Year)" citations, but that involves changes not only to Zotero but also to the Citation Style Language that Zotero (and Mendeley, Papers, etc.) uses to format citations. So it won't happen in the short or medium term.
  • Too bad... But thank you for your answer. :)

    Only out of interst: Does Citavi use an other Citation Style Language?

    Bye, Elisabeth
  • Citavi uses its own, proprietary citation styles, yes.
  • following on from tomak above, if you do get to it, then suppressing parentheses needs to be applied to the entire field, not one ref in it. Tricky.

    Alternatively, a simpler solution would be to offer a shortcut display of the editor (i.e. a button that would 'show editor' without having to hop to the classic view.

    :)
  • I've tried in word (mac, 2011) to remove parenthese manually to compose citations like "Smith (2011)" or even "Smith 2011". After refresh or close/open the document, changes are still there.
    Nowadays, when change citation style, changes dissapear and remains with parenthese at beggining and end of citation: "(Smith 2011)".
    In other different ways is possible this changes disappear later?
  • edited March 22, 2016
    You would manually type the author names outside of the citation, then insert a citation with Zotero, click the reference in the citation pop up, and click "Suppress author".
    https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage#suppress_authors
  • amc
    edited March 22, 2016
    This seems in principle a similar request to
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/54431/multiple-bibliographies-in-one-paper
    but instead of multiple bibliographies (possibly in different styles) it's requesting multiple citation styles. I wonder how difficult it would be to come up with a more comprehensive solution for mixing separate styles in a document. My suspicion is it would be quite difficult but perhaps attainable.
  • So I assume, no advances in this regard?

    Unfortunately, multiple citation styles in the same document is extremely important in my field (econ/finance). Any progress in that direction would be very welcome and without a doubt would lead to a more widespread adoption of Zotero in social sciences.
  • edited November 14, 2016
    Just out of my own curiosity please explain further the meaning of "multiple citation _styles_ in the same document". A link to an example, please. Are you asking for a feature other than that discussed earlier in the thread?
  • (Probably not, "multiple citation styles" is a common way many people describe supporting (Author, Date) and Author (Date) formats.)
  • @DWL-SDCA,

    Apologies for the lack of clarity. I meant what @bwiernik stated. In BibLaTeX, these commans are parencite and textcite, which correspond to (Author, Date) and Author (Date) format respectively.

    What I do is that use the default format throughout the revisions and only change every particular instance to the appropriate format manually before removing all the codes and sending the paper out.
  • Zotero is designed to handle this by using "Supress Author" in the word plugin and writing out the author in the text. See
    https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage#quick_format_citation_dialog
  • edited July 31, 2017
    Why is this such an issue?
    The word plugin just has one button for inserting/editing a ref. But why can't there be two buttons depending on whether the ref is in principle redundant to make a grammatically correct sentence or the ref is part of the grammar:
    * one for a ref that is just added information to an otherwise complete sentence. This would typically look like: "An earlier study confirmed this (Authors, Year)."
    * another button for in-line reference. This would typically look like: "The earlier study of Authors (Year) confirmed this."

    Regardless of the style, these two types of references can be specified and modified. E.g. in some styles, both types of use may look the same: "An earlier study confirmed this [RefNum]." and "The earlier study of [RefNum] confirmed this".

    Seems easy to do, so what are you waiting for Zotero? or am I overlooking something here?
  • @chris.tampere : we're waiting for someone who'd be willing to code that, and it's not "easy to do" : https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5282/ and https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/231542/#Comment_231542
  • I wholeheartedly agree with tomka's comment, too. The best way to achieve this would be to add a button that allows to include or exclude the parenthesis in the citaition. To move from e.g. option to choose between "(Smith, 2001)"
    or "Smith, 2001". The problem with the supress author option or with manually editing comes for some styles for example Harvard, when you have multiple works by the same author in the same year. Then even if you edited manually and removed parenthesis to include a citations such as "Smith, 2001a" and "Smith, 2001b" it becomes an issue if you change the order of citation. Then Zotero correctly would automatically readapt the 'a', and 'b' order, but only readding the parenthesis, which defeats the purpose. Therefore, i believe the best solution is to add a button to enable or disable the adding of the parenthesis, but still keep the updating functionality if one work was cited before another it shoudl be updated to 2011a, instead of staying static as 2011b (because it was cited second in an early draft).
    Any updates on this? Can someone programm this button for Harvard style?
  • edited December 16, 2017
    Another emphatic vote for the suggestions of @tomka and @pralon. A feature that would let one "suppress the parentheses" (analogous to suppressing the author name) would be very much appreciated. This would allow to insert MLA-style citations into sentences without disrupting the grammar, and also sidestep the problems with Harvard outlined by pralon.

    If this is not acceptable for some reason, an option such as suggested by @chris.tampere would be good, too.

    @eyalclyne, if applying a suppression of parentheses to the entire field is difficult, perhaps an option for each entry to suppress left and/or right brackets?

  • @nr10 the problem as I understand it is that it isn't really Zotero that is doing the parenthesis suppression, it's the citeproc engine it embeds (citeproc-js). It may be possible to edit the style to treat "suppress author" as "suppress parenthesis" (although I couldnt find anything in the APA style, perhaps citeproc simply omits the authors when it renders the style, and then my hack wouldn't work) , but this still wouldn't solve the problem for people who need "Author, year", "Author (year)" and "(Author, year)" in the same document.

    It seems like citeproc/CSL wasn't designed with this use-case in mind; perhaps this issue is particular to APA-like styles and citeproc was designed with IEEE-like styles, which don't suffer this problem (but I'm always at a a loss trying to figure out why people would prefer IEEE style bibliograpies).
  • Just to reassure myself, since this discussion is going on for some years now. Is there still no feature like this in sight?

    Like many before me, I also face the situation that I commonly need to cite:

    • (Author et al. Year)

    • Author et al. (Year)

    Using the Suppress Author option and manually writing the author's name before that mostly works, but it's tedious and sometimes gets really difficult when, as mentioned by @Elisabeth2311, for the first citation in the document the first three authors need to be mentioned and the then only Author et al. is used.
  • Suppress Author is currently your only option, but @dstillman, the lead Zotero developer has been actively discussing implementing this recently.
  • Thanks for the answer!
    Then I hope that there will be a decision for the implementation. It might seem like a small feature, but I think it's a key point that will deter quite some people from using Zotero when they are given the choice between difference reference management programmes.
  • Can mendeley actually do this? I thought they also used citeproc-js? Or any other (non-biblatex) bibliography processor?
  • BibLaTeX, Endnote, and citeproc-pandoc can do this currently. There is the capability in citeproc-js to support Author (Date), and as far as I am aware Dan is actively working on getting the pieces in place for this to work.
  • Can pandoc-citeproc do this for any format, or just for pdf using biblatex under the hood?
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