ASA Style - Author-Year order broken in reference list

andershylmo
edited August 17, 2018
I am having trouble with the way the ASA style sorts the reference list. It should be first by author, then by year (not by title). This has apparently been an issue before: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/120425#Comment_120425

I have checked the style file in Zotero's viewer, even if I am not yet familiar with editing style files. As far as I have learned, the command "sort" handles this. This seems to be in order i(I just removed the "<" to be able to view the text). I found two occurences in the file:

sort>
key macro="author-short"/>
key macro="year-date"/>
/sort>

and

sort>
key macro="author"/>
key macro="year-date"/>
key variable="title"/>
/sort>

However, it generates this, which is obviously sorted by AUTHOR-TITLE:

Abbott, Andrew. 2001. Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Abbott, Andrew. 1999. Department & Discipline : Chicago Sociology at One Hundred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Abbott, Andrew. 2005. “Linked Ecologies: States and Universities as Environments for Professions.” Sociological Theory 23(3):245–274.

How does ASA work for other users in this respect? Is there anything I am doing wrong? I have come this far in problem-solving, but now I am completely lost.

  • adamsmith
    Do other styles sort correctly, e.g. Chicago author-date?
  • andershylmo
    Yes, I should have added that. I just created a new word document and confirmed that both Chicago author-date and APA work as expected, but not ASA. I also get the same result when previewing styles in Zotero.
  • andershylmo
    edited August 29, 2018
    I will most probably continue to use the ASA style, and would be willing to try to learn how to edit styles if I can help improve Zotero that way. Because this sorting issue is really bothering me and requires a lot of manual copy pasting every time a paper fininshed.

    Is there anyone responsible for the style, or someone that doesn't have to learn from scratch before I jump into that project? And if I want to get involved, where do I start?
  • adamsmith
    I'm not sure editing would help here. The style looks right to me, so I'm a little uncertain about what's going on. You'll note that this issue was resolved in the thread you link to.
  • andershylmo
    No, of course, I see, but how can I trouble shoot this error?

    For other reasons I just did a clean install of windows, upgrading from Win 7 64 bit and Word 2013 to Win 10 64 bit and Word 2016, and of course a fresh install of Zotero, and synced my library back in from WebDav storage.

    I just confirmed that the problem persists in the new install with a test document. Chosing Chicago A-D, APA and some other default styles sorts the bibliography chronologically, but switching back to ASA sorts it alphabetically (titles) again. So there definitely seems to be something going on with the style.

    I would be glad to tinker a bit with this if it can help solving the problem, but I have no idea what to do.

  • andershylmo
    A relevant question is also if others can reproduce my issue?

    By the way, I opened the styles editor and compared ASA, APA and Chicago A-D. Now I don't understand the code, but the sort command under the tag looks different in the three styles. Could this have something to do with it?

    ASA:
    sort>
    key macro="author"/>
    key macro="year-date"/>
    key variable="title"/>
    /sort>

    APA:
    sort>
    key macro="author"/>
    key macro="issued-sort" sort="ascending"/>
    key macro="title"/>
    /sort>

    Chicago A-D:
    sort>
    key macro="contributors"/>
    key variable="issued"/>
    key variable="title"/>
    /sort>

  • adamsmith
    OK, so this is a bit complicated, but the problem is the original-date in the year-date macro in ASA. We'll fix that; if you need a fix quickly, simply change
    <key macro="year-date"/>
    to <key variable="issued"/>
  • andershylmo
    Thanks a lot for this, and keep up the good work!
  • adamsmith
    OK, just pushed out a fix. Should show up on zotero.org/styles shortly (check the timestamp) and you can then update using "Update Now" in the Zotero preferences or by re-installing the style.
  • andershylmo
    Excellent, thanks!
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