Getting rid of initials/author first names text citations

rebecca.c.wilson
I am not the only one with this problem. I am citing the EXACT same author whose name has been input in the exact same style yet one citation appears as "surname 2007" and the other one is cited as "x.surname 2007". This is driving me up the wall, i am trying to input these into my PhD thesis! There is no consistency whatsoever with the way citations are referred to in the text.

Is there a way or a style that completely disables the author initials and first/second names so it ONLY inputs "surname, date " or "surname et al., date" into the text. If not this is a basic feature that Zotero is lacking....I do not know of any academics (at least in science) that cite the first/second name initials of an author in the text - i have no idea why Zotero makers thought this would be a good idea?!

P.S. i have read all the following who also have problems and note that no solution has ever been provided.

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2325/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2063/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2040/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1989/


Looks like free software, just doesn't provide you with the features you actually need to use and i will have to buy a license for referencing software that actually works!
  • sean
    edited June 10, 2008
    1. What citation style are you using?

    2. Are you using the Word plugin to insert citations?

    3. Are you dealing with two or more works by the same author? Or two or more works by different authors with the same surname?

    Zotero (and any other well-designed reference management software) needs to disambiguate between J. Smith and M. Smith when generating citations. You might be running into a problem here where your library items' creators should be entered identically but are not.
  • nick riches
    I'm also experiencing the same difficulty, but I don't think this is Zotero's fault. Rather, as Sean points out, Zotero is deliberately inserting initials to differentiate two authors with the same surname, and this is likely to be due to the fact that there is inconsistency in the database in terms of the initials used with a particular surname. This problem occurs in all reference packages and is a desirable feature if you are citing work from two different authors with the same surname.

    I think many users of reference packages have experienced this kind of problem, so here's a fantastic idea (!). Would it be possible to incorporate a procedure whereby zotero scans the database for authors with the same surname but different initials? Then the user can manually go through the authors to make sure that there is consistency in the way the initials are used.

    Cheers

    Nick
  • adamsmith
    @Nick - select your entire library and sort by author instead of title in the center panel - you just have to scroll down and look for doubles - this should be pretty quick even with a couple of thousand references.
  • fbennett
    Here's a design question on disambiguation. Suppose I have three references, with entries like this in the database:

    John Smith, Book A (1999)
    John Smith, Book B (2000)
    Albert Smith, Book C (2000)

    I then format these with a style that uses surname only by default, adding author initials for disambiguation. I have assumed that the citations in this case should look like this:

    Smith (1999)
    J. Smith (2000)
    A. Smith (2000)

    Where Rebecca speaks of "consistency" above, does that suggest that these should actually look like this?

    J. Smith (1999)
    J. Smith (2000)
    A. Smith (2000)

    That is to say, should the use of initials or first names, once triggered, become a property of the name itself throughout the document (as in the second example)? Or is the behavior in the first example sufficient? It would be very tough to implement the second example, but I'm curious what authors and editors think.
  • mdoube
    <option name="disambiguate-add-givenname" value="false"/>

    Should do this, right? So if there are several repetitions of the same author but with variations in how their first names were entered, these shouldn't show up at all.

    Unfortunately, they do... I'm using the latest Zotero and OpenOffice.org plugin.
  • mdoube
    The only thing that works so far is to go through and normalise the authors manually, as adamsmith suggests, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having magic web-scraping citation entry, doesn't it.
  • komrade
    edited June 12, 2009
    Just delete the whole line. Unfortunately a bug means value="anything" turns it on, including "false" !

    I've just written a post about this, and a suggestion that some of the default styles have given names turned off, at least for now.
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/7457

    Clearly better reference is needed to it in the documentation too. Maybe a FAQ about Styles with some info. Would you have seen that?
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