Style Request: American Geophysical Union (new)

GAIL
There will be a new AGU style after Sept. 1. It is based on APA with one exception: For references by three or more authors, citations are abbreviated using “et al.” after the first author: (Zhang et al., 2005).

-- https://publications.agu.org/brief-guide-agu-style-grammar/

-- Online ISSN: 1944-7973

-- In-text citation:

(Campbell & Pedersen, 2007)
(Mares, 2001)

Bibliography:
Campbell, J. L., & Pedersen, O. K. (2007). The varieties of capitalism and hybrid success. Comparative Political Studies, 40(3), 307–332. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414006286542
Mares, I. (2001). Firms and the welfare state: When, why, and how does social policy matter to employers? In P. A. Hall & D. Soskice (Eds.), Varieties of capitalism. The institutional foundations of comparative advantage (pp. 184–213). New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • bwiernik
    edited August 22, 2017
    I can put this together quickly.

    Edit: Submitted.
  • jessea2
    edited September 16, 2017
    The update to AGU style is incorrect for in-text citation. First names/initials are being included with the year.
  • bwiernik
    You are probably seeing this:
    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/given_name_disambiguation
  • jessea2
    That was the problem. Thank you for pointing it out.
  • mnewco8290
    I am using this new AGU style with Winword integration and author first names are still showing up within in-text citations. Should I modify and upload the .csl file to Firefox myself to prevent this disambiguation problem?

    Here is what the problem looks like:

    Automatic in-text citation (Nicolas Flipo, Rabouille, et al., 2007; Vilmin, Flipo, Escoffier, Rocher, et al., 2016)

    It should look like this: (Flipo et al., 2007; Vilmin et al., 2016)
  • adamsmith
    Try in a new document with just those two citation -- if the names appear correctly there, this is indeed a disambiguation issue, but the problem is how you have the data in Zotero, not the citation style, which follows APA (and thus now AGU) rules.
  • mnewco8290
    I put the citations in a new document and they look correct. Is there a potential solution to this problem that you suggest?
  • adamsmith
    You need to fix the other citations by the same authors in Zotero -- author names should all be spelled the same across entries. The Vilmin et al. may well be correct, though. APA adds additional author names prior to et-al to disambiguate otherwise similar citations. Might be helpful to check your bibliography.
  • mnewco8290
    Yes the Vilmin one is correct. I checked all of the Flipo entries and one entry had N. for the first name instead of Nicolas and this caused the problem shown above. Thanks for your help.
  • ianchang
    Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this new style!
  • dtwrublewski
    Hi all. Working with a coworker and a patron, I think there is a further correction that needs to be made to this style. We were having a problem with these particular bits of the AGU modification:

    "For references by three or more authors, abbreviate citation using “et al.” after the first author: (Zhang et al., 2005). Please note, this is a deviation from APA style (which lists all author names in works by three to five authors in the first citation in text and “et al.” in subsequent citations)."

    and

    ""If two or more references from the same year contain the same first six or more authors, use a, b, c, and so on for the in-text citation and in the references list (e.g. Tuller et al., 2016a; Tuller et al., 2016b). This is the case even when the entire author lists are not identical. This is to avoid ambiguity in the in-text citation. See also References list, below."

    We looked at the AGU CSL file (dates 5/22/18) and noticed the citation bit looks like:

    <citation et-al-min="3" et-al-use-first="1" disambiguate-add-year-suffix="true" disambiguate-add-names="true" disambiguate-add-givenname="true" collapse="year" givenname-disambiguation-rule="primary-name">

    I don't think all of those disambiguation rules should be set to true. We took out all of them except for the disambiguate-add-year-suffix (which is AGU's direction) and we got the expected result with our citations. I'm not sure if this is the correct place to post, but if there is a specific person we should email, I'm happy to do so. There were a bunch of people listed in the AGU CSL file, so I wasn't sure who the right person to contact was - this is the first time I've had to do this :)

    Thanks for any help & feedback!
  • adamsmith
    If you remove the disambiguation options, though, you get the a/b/c behavior even when the second authors isn't the same, which seems clearly incorrect given the above excerpt.
  • dtwrublewski
    Hm. Are you referring to the first or second example? The problem we ran into is when you have six or more identical authors, the a/b/c notation was being superseded by the disambiguate-add-names tag, per
    http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html
    What would be the solution to that? I can post examples if it will help, but it may take a moment to generate them (they are on my colleague's computer).
  • adamsmith
    I don't think CSL can handle this distinction -- you either use the add name disambiguation or you don't. @Rintze @fbennett is that right?
  • RintzeRintze
    So the style should disambiguate with name disambiguation up to 6 authors, but if the first 6 are identical, switch over to showing just the first author and year-suffix ambiguation? Yeah, that's currently not possible.
  • petrie.research
    I'm using the AGU style (with thanks to the creator), and these papers are both showing up in the text as (Sasgen et al. 2017).

    Sasgen, Ingo, Martín-Español, A., Horvath, A., Klemann, V., Petrie, E. J., Wouters, B., et al. (2017). Altimetry, gravimetry, GPS and viscoelastic modelling data for the joint inversion for glacial isostatic adjustment in Antarctica (ESA STSE Project REGINA). Earth System Science Data Discussions, 1–72. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2017-46

    Sasgen, Ingo, Martín-Español, A., Horvath, A., Klemann, V., Petrie, E. J., Wouters, B., et al. (2017). Joint inversion estimate of regional glacial isostatic adjustment in Antarctica considering a lateral varying Earth structure (ESA STSE Project REGINA). Geophysical Journal International, 211(3), 1534–1553. https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggx368

    If it is not possible to completely comply with the AGU referencing guidelines, how about having two official variants, one which works for 6+ identical authors and one for 2-6 common authors, and hope that not many people have both situations in one manuscript? It is working very well apart from this so far.
  • adamsmith
    For one, theses should be (Sasgen et al. 2017, Sasgen et al. 2018) which takes care of this problem.

    But if I turn them both into 2017, you should be getting
    (Sasgen, Martín-Español, Horvath, Klemann, Petrie, Wouters, Horwath, Pail, Bamber, Clarke, Konrad, & Drinkwater, 2017; Sasgen, Martín-Español, Horvath, Klemann, Petrie, Wouters, Horwath, Pail, Bamber, Clarke, Konrad, Wilson, et al., 2017)

    We're not going to create 2 official styles for such edge cases, no, sorry.
  • dtwrublewski
    @Rintze : I think what AGU is specifying is that for 3 or more authors, you use "et al." from first instance - there's no name disambiguation used at all if you have 3 or more authors. We are currently checking the style details again and will post more soon.
  • adamsmith
    This seems pretty clearly to indicate 6 or more:
    If two or more references from the same year contain the same first six or more authors, use a, b, c, and so on for the in-text citation and in the references list (e.g. Tuller et al., 2016a; Tuller et al., 2016b). This is the case even when the entire author lists are not identical. This is to avoid ambiguity in the in-text citation
    But the answer is still the same with 3 -- it'd still not possible to add authors up to three but not beyond.
  • dtwrublewski
    @adamsmith - yes but the first part of my initial comment also said:
    "For references by three or more authors, abbreviate citation using “et al.” after the first author: (Zhang et al., 2005). Please note, this is a deviation from APA style (which lists all author names in works by three to five authors in the first citation in text and “et al.” in subsequent citations)."
  • dtwrublewski
    We are looking at this now. Personally I think the way AGU has adapted APA is very confusing :(
  • adamsmith
    but that's about a different rule. That's about always listing more authors (up to five) for the first citation, which APA does and AGU doesn't. The second bit is about disambiguating authors.

    AGU's rule makes sense, because you have the first six authors in the bibliography in any case, so listing those in text doesn't require changing the bibliography, it just makes the in-text citation a bit more wordy.
  • dtwrublewski
    Oh, ok maybe we were reading it wrong. I looked at it and thought, anytime you have three or more authors, regardless of whether they are the same or not, you are using "et al.", and at no time are you actually listing three or more authors. Are you saying that for the same first five authors, the in-text citation should contain the five authors' names? I'm not sure that's what AGU wants...
  • adamsmith
    I'm saying that when author lists differ anywhere before the 7th author, they should be printed up to the first differing author, i.e.
    (Smith, Meyer, Doe, Marx, Weber, et al. 2001; Smith, Meyer, Doe, Marx, Pareto, et al. 2001). That's in line with APA.

    But (Smith et al. 2001a, b) if the first six authors are the same, even if the 7th one differs. That's different from APA.
  • dtwrublewski
    Gotcha. So to go back to my original question, how does getting rid of the in-text citation disambiguation rules, except for the letters, not conform to this?
  • dtwrublewski
    The current Zotero AGU style shows multiple authors (4 or more) in the in-text citation, instead of truncating to one and using "et al.".
  • adamsmith
    Because it violates the first part of this rule, i.e.
    [W]hen author lists differ anywhere before the 7th author, they should be printed up to the first differing author, i.e.
    (Smith, Meyer, Doe, Marx, Weber, et al. 2001; Smith, Meyer, Doe, Marx, Pareto, et al. 2001).
  • dtwrublewski
    OK, but that conflicts with AGU also saying "For references by three or more authors, abbreviate citation using “et al.” after the first author: (Zhang et al., 2005). Please note, this is a deviation from APA style (which lists all author names in works by three to five authors in the first citation in text and “et al.” in subsequent citations)." They don't specify that this supersedes the other rule. I'll email them and find out. Sorry to cause all the confusion!
  • adamsmith
    The disambiguation rule almost certainly does supersede et al. rules; that's what it does in APA and that's why it needs to be a separate rule.
  • dtwrublewski
    OK - now I see where you're coming from on that. I'll look to see if we can find some examples in AGU publications, or just email them and ask to make sure. The patron we were working with seemed to interpret it the opposite way. Thank you for all your help! I'll update when I hear back from them.
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