Inserting author names before the parenthetical year in APA style

A psychology professor asked me if it was possible to have Zotero list author names automatically when writing a narrative citation in APA style. For example:

Lee, Williams, and Rodriguez (2018) found that...

I know that the Suppress Author feature would result in a citation that looks like the above, but would require you to type out "Lee, Williams, and Rodriguez" first. So is there a way to have Zotero list the author names for you *before* the parenthetical part so that you wouldn't write them out manually?

One workaround I thought of was to insert a normal (i.e., non-author-suppressed citation) and then when you're done, un-link the document and manually move the parentheses around, but that doesn't seem ideal in case you need to make later changes to the document.

Thanks!


  • No, currently the recommended method is to manually type the authors in text and use Suppress Author. When I am writing, my approach is to do one of two things: (1) first insert the citation without Suppress Author, copy and paste the authors into the text, then edit the citation with Zotero and check Suppress Author, or (2) use constructs such as "Lee and colleagues (2018)" whenever I use author names in text so as to obviate needing to type all of the names or manage whether all names or et al should be used.

    Either of these workflows should be much faster than moving things around after unlinking citations.

    The CSL development community is aware of the demand for supporting Author (Year) formatted citations, but doing so would require rewriting hundreds of existing styles, so any such changes will not come in the near future.
  • Thanks for the response, very helpful!
  • Hi guys,

    has there been any development on this issue? While writing on my PhD papers, I use narrative citation a lot (and I think I'm not the only one...) and would be really greatful if this quite basic feature could be implemented to Zotero. I imagine something like a checkbox in the dialog which appears, when I click on the citation, to select "narrative citation" , comparable to the "suppress author" checkbox.

    Thanks for all your work,

    Martin
  • There's been significant progress, but it's not available yet. (Despite outward appearances, it's actually an extremely complicated problem.)
  • I appreciate the news about progress. The lack of author names before the parenthetical year is the main reason my colleagues and I still use Endnote.
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