3 Dashes in place of author in bibliography

zas101
In my bibliography that I added in my word document, for some reason there are dashes in place of the authors name if I have multiple sources by the same author and I don't know what to do to get rid of them, so the authors actual name is written instead, HELP!!
  • bwiernik
    This isn’t a bug. This is controlled by the citation style. Some styles like Chicago replace repeated authors with dashes. That’s correct for the style. What style are you using?
  • zas101
    I am using Chicago, but is there a way to change it so instead of the dashes the authors name is there? Why does it do that, as far as I know I don't think its a Chicago rule to put dashes in the authors place is there are multiple sources written by the same author?
  • adamsmith
    It absolutely is in the Chicago Manual to do that, yes, and that's why the style implements it.
    You'd have to modify the style or choose a different one if you don't want that.
  • Bruce Rusk
    This is actually tricky: the Chicago Manual (17th ed., 14.67) advises, "Authors usually should not use the 3-em dash for repeated names in their manuscripts." They recommend that it be left to publishers to convert repeated names to dashes, if they choose do so.
    Not sure what the best solution is (fork of Chicago style?), but having the option to turn off name replacement would be valuable.
  • adamsmith
    edited April 23, 2021
    Obviously people are free to fork the style they want changed individually -- this is a very quick change -- but given that this applies to all CMoS styles, I'd want to see significant demand before duplicating any of them on the repository.
    edit: FWIW, none of the concerns of the manual for authors doing these apply to Zotero, which handles the sorting and keeps the label (ed., trans. etc.)
  • Bruce Rusk
    Yes, sorting etc. are not an issue, but there are definitely publishers who don't want authors to use the 3-em dashes--among other things, it can prevent proper parsing of references.
    For example, Bloomsbury tells its authors: "Always repeat the name for subsequent entries by the same author – the 3-em-dash rule is not allowed in a References section, as it causes problems for XML tagging and eBook editions. "
  • alexrogansbeta
    Apparently this was never followed up on, but the Chicago Style Guide does, indeed, state that authors should "usually not use the 3-em dash" and many journals do not want em-dashed bibliographic entries for multiple same-author entries. The em-dash for Chicago should be an option, rather than the default. Is there a way to easily change this in the code?
  • adamsmith
    As I say above, it's easy to change:
    remove subsequent-author-substitute="———" from the style.
    General instructions are here.
    https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step

    I see no good way of making this optional otherwise -- Zotero has only one preference that affects style behavior ("Include URL" in Cite --> Styles) and that causes unending confusion among both users and style editors and may not have been a good idea to introduce in the first place. But even if it was, it's a much more widely applicable rule and there's no way we can pref every optional behavior.
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