duplicated date

hi,
i work on Mac with Word.
OS (v. 10.13.6), Word (v. 16.15), Zotero (v. 5.0.54) are all updated to the last version.
i have items of type "web page" which give me a duplicated 'edition' date when they are put into a bibliography:

«IFLA -- IFLA/UNESCO Public Library Manifesto 1994». 1994. 1994. https://www.ifla.org/publications/iflaunesco-public-library-manifesto-1994.

the behaviour is the same for all of my "web page" items.
the original item in the database for the above bibliographic item is this one (i changed the < and > of RDF into [ and ] for visualization reasons):

[bib:Document rdf:about="https://www.ifla.org/publications/iflaunesco-public-library-manifesto-1994"]
[z:itemType]webpage[/z:itemType]
[dcterms:isPartOf]
[z:Website][/z:Website]
[/dcterms:isPartOf]
[link:link rdf:resource="#item_1750"/]
[link:link rdf:resource="#item_1751"/]
[dc:identifier]
[dcterms:URI]
[rdf:value]https://www.ifla.org/publications/iflaunesco-public-library-manifesto-1994[/rdf:value]
[/dcterms:URI]
[/dc:identifier]
[dc:date]1994[/dc:date]
[dcterms:dateSubmitted]2018-08-02 10:24:25[/dcterms:dateSubmitted]
[dc:title]IFLA -- IFLA/UNESCO Public Library Manifesto 1994[/dc:title]
[/bib:Document]

i know that i can edit the bibliography thanks to the "add/edit bibliography" button, so that i can delete the duplicated date, but i'd prefer to understand what's happening.
thank you for your help
maurizio
  • What style are you using?
  • chicago 17th, author-date
  • Thanks, yes. That looks like a bug in the style. A fixed style is available here:
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/citation-style-language/styles/4b3302a9d5afb67ab5d49331d5798dfa336b8b10/chicago-author-date.csl

    Try that out and see if it works correctly for you.
  • i understand that i must download the .csl file and copy it into the proper folder.
    am i right?
    m
  • done. it is working.
    thank you!
    m
  • Actually, the unadjusted style is correct.
    https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/pull/3638

    The 17th edition of the Chicago manual specifies that the year should be given following the author, but then the full publication date (specifically, the last modified date) given after the title. This looks a little weird when you cite a webpage with neither an author nor a full date (with year, month, and day), but it is correct according to the manual.

    To get more appealing looking citations, you should provide an author for the webpage (e.g., IFLA as an institutional author) and the last-modified month and day.

    If you want to keep using the technically incorrect style I linked to, you will need to open the CSL style file in a text editor like Notepad or Textedit, change to the style title and id at the top of the the style, save the file, and install in Zotero.
  • interesting analysis!
    what i think is that apparently the Chicago style does, is to trivially assimilate web pages to printed matters.
    in fact even if in the case of the IFLA pages which gave me the error we have collective author and full date, actually it is not usual for a webpage to have an author or a full date.
    (so i revert to the original style and provide the IFLA web pages of author and date...)
    maurizio
  • edited August 8, 2018
    what i think is that apparently the Chicago style does, is to trivially assimilate web pages to printed matters.
    no. Both the editors of the Manual and the editors of the CSL style know what they're doing with respect to webpages.
    Also, you can almost always identify an author (either corporate or personal) for webpage content and you can very frequently establish an exact date for said content (e.g. at the bottom of the webpage you're citing it explicitly state that it's been last update on September 1, 2016). In most cases where you cannot, you should likely leave the date field blank and Zotero will (again, as per the Manual) revert to the access date instead.


  • i tried what you suggested: "The 17th edition of the Chicago manual specifies that the year should be given following the author, but then the full publication date (specifically, the last modified date) given after the title."

    this implies, it seems to me, that i should be able to have two date informations: one for publication and one for last modification. but the objet type webpage allows only for one date, and it allows only for input of the year.
    any ideas?
  • edited August 8, 2018
    Enter the full date in the Date field (i.e., November 18 2015 or whatever). From Chicago’s perspective, the last modified date _is_ the publication date. If you want to also store the original publication date, do this in Extra:
    Original Date: 2012-12-01
  • uhmm...
    ok, this is a way to enter 2 different dates for a web page.
    it remains that for some webpages (like those for their Manifestos) it is not sensible to have 2 dates because even if the page was modified (say: correvt a typo, add a link to a new translation) it remains that "the date of publication" is one. for a manifesto published in the 2010, no way to add a second different date.
    i think i'll resort to editing the final bibliography.
  • no way: no reason
  • edited August 10, 2018
    @m.lana I said above how to add two dates for a webpage (or any other item). Enter the last modified date in the Date field and the original publication date in Extra like this:
    Original Date: 2018-03-31

    This will get picked up by styles that support original dates (e.g., Chicago). No need to manually edit.
  • Hi I could not download the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (AGLC) style through the style section (due to my firewall) so I had to download manually the style and then add it. It seems to be duplicating the date and a few other issues. Do you have a more recent file I can download?
  • Where did you download the style from? The one on zotero.org/styles is the most recent version for the 3rd edition.
  • I've noticed that if I have no date it will show "n.d." and "Accessed February 28, 2021."
    However, if I do have date, it will just show: “Website name.” 2021. 2021. https://websiteaddress.com/index.html.
    I do want the "Accessed ..." to still show up. Can someone help fix this?
  • Which citation style?
  • edited March 1, 2021
    Chicago 17th (author-date)

    For the reference, when I don't have date for the entry, it looks like this:
    “Website name.” n.d. Accessed February 28, 2021. https://websiteaddress.com/index.html.
  • That's not the accessed date, that's supposed to be the full issued date. This is mostly a problem with your data in Zotero:
    a) You don't have enough other information about the webpage such as author and website title and
    b) you don't have a full publication date (such as February 28, 2020 or so)

    Ideally we wouldn't duplicate the date in the case of b), but there's currently no way for citation styles to test whether you have a day & month in your item information.
  • edited March 1, 2021
    If I copy "Title" contents into "website title" field (I don't understand why I need to do this but ok), and change "Date" to 2021/01/24:
    “Website name.” 2021. Website name. January 24, 2021. https://websiteaddress.com/index.html.

    the Accessed date is still gone. Or maybe it is the first 2021 there, but why is the day and the word "Accessed" gone? It doesn't make sense.
  • You don't need to include a website title, but citations will look more reasonable if you provide more relevant information. You shouldn't just repeate the same information. A Website (typically the entire web operation of a given organization/person/group) is different from a webpage (one specific page/URL).

    The accessed date is specifically not recommended for inclusion in the Chicago Manual unless a webpage doesn't have a publication date. That's what you're seeing.
  • edited March 1, 2021
    Thank you adamsmith. Sometimes it is hard to know what to put as author and title. Like this one that I am working with rn (lilypond.org). I have also been having a hard time knowing what to put as date for github repos for example, where there isn't a specific date of release, it is constantly being developed, and the moment I worked on it (accessed it) is rather important, I believe. I appreciate your help and clarifications.
  • For Lilypond -- if you want to cite the software, cite the software (currently "computer program" in Zotero) with version number
    I'd consider citing the current development team as authors if you use it a lot.

    -- similarly for github: if a project tags releases, cite those as a version number. If you care about specific commits, access dates don't help you either as you often have multiple a day.
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