Creator (Author) First Name Last Name formatting

gsward
When an author has a name in the format, say,

Dr. Frederick Bloggs M.A. F.S.A.

If you enter as two parts:

(last) (first)
Bloggs M.A. F.S.A. Dr. Frederick

Then switch to one field i.e. (full name) all looks OK.

(full name)
Dr. Frederick Bloggs M.A. F.S.A.

until you switch back to (last) (first), it splits on the last space so you end up with:

(last) (first)
F.S.A. Dr. Frederick Bloggs M.A.

What am I doing wrong?
Should I never use (full name) unless it is an organisation?

Thanks.
  • bwiernik
    Yes, never use (full name) unless it’s an organization.

    Generally, titles and degrees aren’t included in citations, so you would just enter this person as
    Bloggs || Frederick

    If you want to include the titles/degrees in citations (again, I don’t recommend this), enter them in the First Name field after a comma:
    Bloggs || Frederick, M.A. F.S.A.
  • gsward
    Thank you. The trouble was actually ocurring from imported data, so I have some editing to do!
  • bwiernik
    Yeah, sometimes sites don’t have the best quality data, so some manual editing is needed.
  • trelab
    Is there a way to BULK change a selection of entries with the creator/name in a single field/full name to Last, First? An import of many entries put all names in a single field and it would take a large amount of time to change these manually. Thank you.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited April 1, 2021
    Depending on the nature of the creators' names (double or triple last name, name particles, etc.) you can have at least good results using Zotero's built-in single-field/2-field button/icon. Some names will need to be hand-edited. After accomplishing a few edits the process can move along more rapidly

    You are not alone in your frustration but my recommended Zotero trick above is the best that be done with automated name adjustment. I, too, have metadata sources where author names are provided in a single field. Your situation could be even worse: One of my greatest headaches is a publisher in China where the non-Roman character and transliterated names for each author are in the same, single field. This is further complicated by their following the convention that the first-listed author is lastname firstname (without a comma separator) and subsequent authors are firstname lastname. This is still further complicated by the pan-Asian nature of the journal and the practice of some (non-Chinese) Asian authors to use single (Roman) letter 'last' names (LongStringOfLetters B where "B" is not an abbreviated first name). _Most but not all_ authors with non-Roman names have accompanying Roman-character names. Except that the journal commonly has authors with Arabic, Eastern European Cyrillic, Persian, and Thai names and only _some_ are transliterated to Roman characters [with some names also as Chinese characters].The publisher indicates that they use UTF8 but actually uses a character set other than Unicode (on my Mac some characters appear as a tiny box, a string of advanced ascii jibberish, or html entities). Single and double quotation marks show as strings of weird characters. They seem to use several different characters in their English language abstracts to indicate the end of a sentence - only two of which are recognizable [. and ∘] I wouldn't bother with this journal if we weren't well-compensated by a contributor _because_ we include its articles. Everything from this journal is hand-entered from PDFs.

    See also:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/85929/issue-with-author-names-with-all-aha-american-heart-association-journals#latest

    edit: closed a parentheses set.
  • trelab
    Thanks. I may have been fortunate facing fewer corrections... but now you have illuminated some complexities about which I may have been previously, blissfully, ignorant :-) Although not tidy, given the editing numbers, shifting to correcting the name fields on an as-needed basis.
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