Problem with editing bibliography in MS Word

Hi, I have 2 related problems:
1) I insert bibliography in MS Word 2007, citation style APA. If there are more articles written by the same author in the same year, they are not displayed in alphabetical order (and not in any order I can understand).
2) When I open editing bibliography, and I click to an item in the right column, then the item immediately looses its labeling in the year. For example, the item was labeled "(2008c)" and now it is only "(2008)". This happens before I click at "OK" button and when I press ESC, it does not help. The change has been done already by clicking at the item in the right column.
Thanks for your help!
  • 1) looks to me to be an issue with sorting by full date instead of sorting by year. Is their addition additional date information guiding the order of your citations? If we can confirm that this is the issue, and confirm exactly what APA would like us to do one of the CSL experts that lurks in these forums can probably fix this issue for us.

    So:
    Obrian, T. (2009a, January 1). zbook.
    Obrian, T. (2009b, December 1). abook.

    2) I just confirmed this and it is clearly a problem with the Word plugin. I have opened a ticket for it.
  • edited June 11, 2009
    @svobomir,

    I'm curious about this, and would like to prepare a test for the new CSL processor, to be sure that it behaves correctly. Could you post the plain text of a series of bibliography entries that show the bad behavior, and of the series correctly sorted? From those samples I can produce a test.
  • Ad 1:
    I have found what the system of sorting was. First, according to date, second, alphabetically. Entries without months are sorted in front of entries with them - no matter that months are not visible. See in my example below: entry "Davidson, P. (2008a). Securitization..." comes before "Davidson, P. (2008b). Is..." because in my Zotero library the first one has the date "2008-01" but the second one only "2008".
    For me, this is curious. Is this, what APA wants? (I thought that APA wants it to be only alphabetically but I may be wrong.)

    Here is the series sorted by Zotero:
    Davidson, P. (1996). Reality...
    Davidson, P. (2008a). Securitization...
    Davidson, P. (2008b). Is...
    Davidson, P. (2008c). How...
    Davidson, P. (2008d, October 4). Evaluating...
    Davidson, P. (2008e, November 6). Reforming...
    Davidson, P. (2009a). Risk...
    Davidson, P. (2009b, April 7). Can...
  • Glad to hear the image has cleared up. In the style file apa.csl, the sort keys are for author, then date. The titles should be coming out in the order that they are cited in the document, and that looks like what's happening (from the order of the 2008a, b and c entries). If that's not the correct sort algorithm for APA, it could be changed, but at least things seem to be doing what they're expected to do. The new processor should produce the same results for this style.
  • I think APA (and quite a few other styles) should indeed sort by year of issue instead of by date of issue.

    This page describes APA 5th edition:
    http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/05/
    "If you have more than one article by the same author, single-author references or multiple-author references with the exact same authors in the exact same order are listed in order by the year of publication, starting with the earliest."
  • I changed the APA style to sort by year of issue (both for citations clusters and the bibliography). The new version can be installed via the Zotero Style Repository (look under "Additional Styles") or directly via this link.
  • Thanks Rintze. It helped to solve the same problem with my personal style (created from APSA).
    But, there is still a problem... When you cite different types of references with different years, for instance a book and a journal article not published the same year, but coming from the same author : it is not sorted by date in the bibliography. The references appear in the bibliography in the order in which they appear in the text.

    Example :
    (Baines, 2007a) (Baines, 2007b)
    (Noiriel, 1989a) (Noiriel, 1989b) (Noiriel, 1986) blablabla (Noiriel, 1985)

    Baines, D. (2007a). Immigration and the Labour Market. Dans N. Crafts, I. Gazeley, & A. Newell (Éd.), Work and Pay in Twentieth Century Britain (pp. 330-352). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Baines, D. (2007b). European Immigration since 1945. Dans M. Schulze (Éd.), Western Europe. Economic and Social change since 1945 (pp. 177-190). Londres: Longman.
    Noiriel, G. (1989a). Une histoire sociale du politique est-elle possible ? Vingtième Siècle, 24(1), 81-96.
    Noiriel, G. (1989b). Workers in French Society in the 19th & 20th Centuries (p. 278). Oxford: Berg.
    Noiriel, G. (1986). Les ouvriers dans la société française : XIXe-XXe Siècle. Points (p. 317). Paris: Seuil.
    Noiriel, G. (1985). Immigration : le fin mot de l'histoire. Vingtième Siècle, 7(1), 141-150.


    Everything is fine with Baines (same date, same author) and with Noiriel 1989 (same date, same author), but it goes wrong for the other "Noiriel" references.

    Any idea about how to solve this problem?

    Thanks!
  • edited July 6, 2009
    AntonP: which style are referring to? The updated APA style, or your own APSA-derived style? If the latter, please post that style to http://gist.github.com/ so I can take a look.
  • Actually to both of them... My concern is about my APSA-derived style (posted on http://gist.github.com/ a second ago), but I noticed the same problem with the updated APA style as well.
  • edited July 6, 2009
    I can reproduce the problem in my updated version of APA, although the CSL looks good. Might be a bug in the CSL processor.
  • Mmh... doesn't sound good... It would be intersting to know if this is a bug we can see on the other styles as well. I'll have a look.
  • I have a question about APSA style. I am using Word 2007, Zotero 2.07.b and the MS Word plugin to create in-text citations. Whenever I insert an author/year/page number citation (i.e. without suppressing year) I get an extra space between the author's name and the year. Is there any way to fix this problem?

    Thanks!
  • I believe that's there on purpose - at least it's by design.
    I don't have an APSA styleguide atm - if you can confirm that it doesn't belong I'll take it out.

    You can also do it yourself by finding this part in the style:
    <layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">
    <group delimiter=", ">
    <group delimiter=" ">
    <text macro="author-short"/>
    <text macro="year-date"/>
    </group>


    and taking the space out of the second <group delimiter>so that it reads
    <group delimiter="">

    http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits
    for how to do this.
Sign In or Register to comment.