Ibid. at the start of a new page

chrismay
Hi all,

thank you for this very helpful forum. It helped me a lot to create a citation style, which is underlying by the APA-Style with some specifications.

I have a question related to ibid. I managed to insert the coding, but unfourtanetly the behavior is still not perfect. This is the code section i used to include ibid in my style:

<citation et-al-subsequent-min="3" et-al-subsequent-use-first="1" disambiguate-add-names="true" disambiguate-add-givenname="true" disambiguate-add-year-suffix="true" collapse="year">
<sort>
<key macro="author"/>
<key macro="issued-year"/>
</sort>
<layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">
<choose>
<if position="ibid-with-locator">
<group delimiter=", ">
<text term="ibid"/>
<text macro="citation-locator"/>
</group>
</if>
<else-if position="ibid">
<text term="ibid"/>
</else-if>
<else>
<group delimiter=", ">
<text macro="author-short"/>
<text macro="issued-year"/>
<text macro="citation-locator"/>
</group>
</else>
</choose>
</layout>
</citation>


I would like to include some kind of an AND-Condition or another If-Construct that checks whether the ibid is then used on the same page in the document or not. This should help to avoid that an ibid will be shown at the beginning of the next page. If a new page begins, it would be nice to see the authors lastname, so that you do not have to look on a page before.

While i did not found any solution in this forum and also read that this might be impossible i want to ask you...

1. Is it really not possible and if not, will it be possible in proximal future?
2. Should i overwrite the low number of cases of ibids at the beginning of a new page or
should i go the other way around and write the ibids by myself. What is the better "workaround"?

As always thank you very much and i am looking forward to your answers,
Chris
  • djross3
    edited November 20, 2019
    I don't see how this would (ever) be possible with Zotero, because it inserts citations just as text fields not sensitive to context that can then move around including across page boundaries. The only way to do this would be to somehow change it after pagination. Even if Zotero could do this, it would change any time that the fields move around in a document. I suppose you could then refresh it, but that would mean refreshing Zotero as the last step every time, including the confusing fact that it would also change pagination by making full cites shorter when converting to ibid.

    (Someone might correct me, but I hope that's helpful as a fast answer.)

    Regarding how to manually fix this:
    1. It would be easier to find ibid (just search for it) to identify instances where it is first on a page.
    2. It would be easier to replace the full cite with ibid, because otherwise you'd need to look it up (on the previous page) to find what to write instead.
    So it seems mixed to me. Up to you.

    The only automated solution I can imagine would be a Word macro that would replace the fields one way or the other if they matched certain criteria. That seems very complex to write (not something to try if you've never written macros in Word before), but probably technically possible. You'd still need to run this manually, each time immediately before exporting any document, however, because it would need to take into account the final pagination of the document. (It might be slightly easier or more consistent to implement something like ibid-if-only-in-the-same-paragraph, following similar steps.)
  • maier.de
    Not possible at the moment. And certainly tricky to implement. But also not impossible to implement either. (It can be done with Citavi. So it must be possible somehow.)
  • chrismay
    I would totally agree, that this is something that should show up in a future development roadmap. There are many requests for this issue. But i do understand that this is not high priority.

    I like Zotero and this is not a "showstopper". Easy to handle with replacing the small number of cases. Thanks all for your quick responses.
  • Hartenthaler.Tamara
    please implement :-)
  • aaronwit
    the envisioned solution is to insert blank citations to prevent zotero from writing ibid. This blank citation is invisible but can be edited and may not be included in the bibliography. Will zotero make it happen?
  • adamsmith
    No, Zotero prevent blank citations, not likely to happen because if inserted incorrectly they can cause havoc, sorry.
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