Request for Zotero: non-Western author name conventions

kws6cd
Hello. First, thank you for this awesome citation management software.

I'd like to ask the Zotero developers to consider adding an option for non-Western author name conventions for citations that would allow the author's surname to ALWAYS appear first when cited.

Currently it is not possible to clearly and correctly cite Chinese names, let alone use Chinese characters for names, because Chinese names are typically in this order: [Surname] [Given name].

For example, Mao Zedong's surname/family name is Mao and his given name is Zedong. To make this more clear for non-Chinese speakers, in English we don't refer to him as Zedong Mao (and if I asked you about Jinping Xi you'd wonder who the heck I was talking about)- it is always Mao Zedong (and Xi Jinping). So, even though we may not realize it in English we share the same naming conventions for Chinese people. This is reflected in the way these citations work within scholarly publications as well.

Thank you for considering this improvement to your product.
  • adamsmith
    I think the standard current way to do this would be to just add them in single field mode in Zotero, so that they always appear ans Mao Zedong. This wouldn't give you the ability to just get "Mao" or "Mao 1970" but my understanding was that that's not common anyway?

    (I also seemed to recall there was some specific code for Chinese character names in Zotero citation styles, but I may be misremembering that)
  • kws6cd
    That's a great work around- and one that I used in the past. But it doesn't really solve the problem, and in many cases results in significant problems over the course of, let's say, a 200 page dissertation.
  • adamsmith
    You'd need to say more about the problems. Name order and display is a vexing issue in databases and not forcing family and givenname separation is a widely recommended solution. It's possible this won't work here, but we'd want to know why&how.
  • kws6cd
    Fair enough. I didn't mean to be flip, and I understand that database architecture and logics are incredibly ornate. (My husband is a data architect- so truly I know this is a significant proposal. However, I believe properly citing non-Western authors is an important scholarly practice.)

    I use Chicago Style as I'm in architectural history. Let's look at an example for an English book with two western authors as if it were cited in my footnotes twice:

    1. Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LaMay, Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 24-25.

    2. Minow and LaMay, Presidential Debates, 24-25.

    If I wanted to cite a publication where there is either a) more than one Chinese author, or, b) Chinese and Western co-authors, the solution of putting the Chinese author's name into a single field results in non-standard citations for every entry in the footnotes following the first. This is a problem for publications where there is a single Chinese author as well.



  • kws6cd
    Perhaps this is trickier with Chicago than with other citation styles. I'm simply not as familiar.
  • adamsmith
    Thanks -- I found the most recent extended discussion of this here:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/348888/#Comment_348888

    It looks like I remembered correctly that this would work with names entered in Chinese characters, but not with transliterated names.
    In all honesty, I don't think this will happen in the near future. If this just applied to works in the respective language, it'd be _relatively_ easy to do -- we'd just need to specify formatting by item language. But given that this requires mark-up at the name level, I'm afraid this just isn't going to happen in standard Zotero in the foreseeable future.
  • kws6cd
    That's pretty much what I thought you/Zotero would say, and I appreciate you discussing this issue with me.
Sign In or Register to comment.