Upgrade StorageEmbedding citation in Word without brackets
When i embed citation in Word (DOCX) file with Zotero plugin, it shows like this:
(Dog, 1970)
But sometimes i need to cite like this: Dog (1970)
That means that the name of the author should be outside the brackets.
How it can be done?
(Dog, 1970)
But sometimes i need to cite like this: Dog (1970)
That means that the name of the author should be outside the brackets.
How it can be done?
This means that i cannot update the citation correctly, except the year.
I presume this is a lacking feature of Zotero.
There has been some progress on making this easier-- the new version of the citation processor can insert only the author, but no one has quite figured out how to integrate such functionality into Zotero in a way that makes sense. Your advice here is welcome-- what workflow would you imagine?
I used Zotero Word plug-in extensively for a month and recently noticed that are two different techniques of citation with/without brackets in the articles.
If i use Zotero plugin citation this limits me to specific style of writing because bracket citation is used mostly in the end of the sentence and i am using it everywhere (i think professor will be angry).
I don't know how to solve it, it think the best solution is to allow citation without brackets around the name.
Yes, there are languages that add suffixes to Names such as Russian Language.
For instance
Male Author: Dog, Cat, Cow
Female Author: Doginskaya, Catinskaya, Cowskoya
The suffix for most female authors is: aya
I think it also applicable to German but i am not sure, i know only Russian.
In English (not my native language though) we don't use suffixes so my proposal is not a problem, also English is the main language for citation and research paper so high percent of users will appreciate this.
So you can create two modes of citation:
1. English mode: with or without brackets, according to need of the sentence. No suffix control is needed (default mode).
2. Suffix mode: with or without brackets but with an ability to TWEAK author name so it will be possible to add suffixes. Yes this created an UPDATE/REFRESH issue but if we talk about a Russian language (for instance) from the beginning the user should write the last name with the suffix (anyway there should be a suffix control for times when the user is not sure about the gender of the writer or decides to leave it to a later date).
In that thread, I said: As you see, even for languages with limited inflectional morphology (English), this still doesn't work. And I think you really don't want to try to make an automated system for this in the many languages that do have inflectional morphology (Slavic and Turkic languages are particularly rich in this area). Do you suggest users somehow mark the stem so that it is inserted by Zotero, and the suffix will be inserted by the user? This strikes me has more convoluted and error-prone than the current system. Indeed, we know from Slavic alone that even stems aren't stable; consider: "основные результаты Льва Толстого (1863; 1865)" [in Russian; given name used for disambiguation shows ь/е alternation in the stem] or "první článek Haška (1924)" [in Czech; surname shows an etymologically similar e/null alternation in the stem].
My proposal is simple: Lets focus on English language for time being.
I cannot imagine creating an automating system that will create suffixes for different variation but again i am not a computer or linguistic expert.
Anyhow majority of users are writing relatively short papers. most scientific papers span 15-45 pages, so a fix here and there is not what will kill us.
I read the post in the link that you sent me, i probably start using the manual override, as i said "fix here and there won't kill us".
I wonder how other Professional and paid citation software handle this issue?
As for the feature-completeness of Zotero, and how other software handles this, I'm pretty confident that Zotero has the most robust and expressive citation support of anything currently on the market. It certainly is a professional piece of citation software. Mendeley's support is very similar, of course, since it uses the same citation engine as Zotero,
citeproc-js.This is also not the time to focus on only English-- any new functionality in Zotero must be developed with the intent of making it work well with most or all languages; anything else is not acceptable for a large software project with a worldwide user base and a fast-growing presence around the world. We're doing enough backtracking now to fix Anglocentric assumptions without adding more assumptions.
2. I succeeded some how to do what i wanted with EDITOR. I edited citation in Zotero editor and changed brackets location, but then i lost the ability to update the names.
I think there is some promise in Zotero editor, it can work similar to Word 2007 blocks/Excel formula syntax, just place some blocks in certain order and presto.
Don't use the edit citation functionality unless absolutely necessary. The correct solution at present is to use "Suppress Author" and enter the names separately; other solutions are going to cause problems.
I regret Bibus for this simple functionnality, there is a button inside Word/OOo allowing to switch easily from one way to other one...
it would be a huge improvement to the workflow if one could easily copy the author names to the clipboard. At the moment its impossible to select and copy/paste the author's name into the text. Ctrl+c/Ctrl+v is much more convenient than entering often several weird names by hand. And it shouldn't be too difficult to implement, right? Just make the text selectable.
Basically, the word processor plugin could automatically insert the formatted author names before the "suppress author"-citation field.
The word plugin just has one button for inserting/editing a ref. But why can't there be two buttons depending on whether the ref is in principle redundant to make a grammatically correct sentence or the ref is part of the grammar:
* one for a ref that is just added information to an otherwise complete sentence. This would typically look like: "An earlier study confirmed this (Authors, Year)."
* another button for in-line reference. This would typically look like: "The earlier study of Authors (Year) confirmed this."
Regardless of the style, these two types of references can be specified and modified. E.g. in some styles, both types of use may look the same: "An earlier study confirmed this [RefNum]." and "The earlier study of [RefNum] confirmed this".
Seems easy to do, so what are you waiting for Zotero? or am I overlooking something here?
From my point of view this discussion is utmost academic in the negative meaning.
As one can see, the mass of Citation-"Styles" is there for historical reasons because the Journals cooked their dinner all alone. No one needs that number of styles. The differences of the styles are academically worthless.
Why do we need more than one citation-style per specialty, e.g. medicine? And where is the sense and meaning for more than one Inline-Citation-Style?
If I look at the List of citation-styles, they seem to be selfish and somehow ridicolous. I don't need different Inline-Citation-Styles.
The Journal-editors should find a way to give up more the 99% of them - they are sens- and useless.
Why? There should be articles out there which are quality based. For these a DOI would be a perfect reference, or the short-forms. One should cite good articles, not the ones with the "right names".
The Authors Name's reflect on eminence - that concept is out of date. Let's talk about evidence. Let's march for Science!
The value of a work written doesn't depend on the formatting of the inline-citations. If your Professor is so keen on that, you should change the Department, just because that is the wrong focus of and on your work!
So, write whole and correct sentences, and add the authors Name in brackets at the end. If you do that right, you will maybe get a Nobel-Price.
And be assured that scientist are able and willing to read citations in round or squared brackets, with comma or without, etc. ...
Getting a Design-Price is somehow still worthless in Science... and again: if your Professor is to short-minded on that, you're at the wrong place!
The point is that the text editor should not decide how I write by simply not supporting a very common stylistic choice. Of course I can read and write all kinds of citation styles. And you can justly criticize the fact that every journal may want its own style.
But here we're talking about "style" in the sense of: "how I use language". And that is any author's decision. And nothing academic at all. This has to do with the freedom to structure sentences the way you want to make a text flow naturally and elegantly. There is nothing wrong with elegant language in science, is there?
Finally, your point of "eminence" or "right names" is pointless too. I'm talking about Author (Year) vs (Author, Year); in both the names are shown in the text. So that doesn't make any difference. But even though this is not the topic here, I prefer such styles regardless. Not because of "name dropping", but because I am so aware of the state of the art that a style using the author's name saves me half of the time of browsing back and forth between text and refs list, as I can very often identify the paper just by name and year, which is impossible in a [RefNum] style.
Back to topic then: I saw discussions elsewhere on the forum that what I request would be complex. I don't get the point there, but it is clear that Zotero will not support this any time soon... :-(
I critized the inflation of "Styles", and the fact that nearly any journal has "it's own" so called "Citation-Style", inline as well as the citation list itself. That leads to the problems most of us have. If we had far less "Styles" we could bring up the really needed ones: A full-cite-version, a short form like "Journal - Volume - Issue - Page", and a Inline-citation version. That would be enough. On Slides I use the short form or simply the DOI.
What you want from the view of a writer can be seen as stylistic, too. I understand that your preferred solution maybe more fluent in the reading. I myself prefere the inline-citation in brackets, as I can clearly see what the citation is. The sentences are readable, too.
I prefer inline-citations by number. I print out the citation-list of an article twice and lay it beside when I read the article to have a look on teh full cite. And to be honest: no, I don't read every cited article completely.
What I would prefer are inline-citations that refer to the paragraph to whom they are bound - that would bes the right way to cite.
Maybe there will be a solution in your sense, but the complexity for this seems to be a real problem.
@chris.tempere The CSL programming language, which Zotero uses to format its references doesn’t currently support two different formats for the in-text citations within the same style—i.e., Author (Date) and (Author, Date). There is general agreement among the people involved in the CSL project that supporting such structures would be good, but adding such support would require determining exactly how such alternate structures would work programmatically, revising the many existing citation styles to support the new structure, working with the programmers of the processor programs that implement the language, and coordinating across the dozens of reference management programs to implement user access to the two formats. That obviously will be a great deal of work and will take some time, unfortunately. Currently, the best way to get Author (Date) formatted references is to use the Suppress Author function and then you the names manually. Personally, I tend to use structures like “Jones and colleagues” to avoid style differences in how the outside-parentheses author names are structured.
Theme: Instructional Design
Articles: Smith & Jones, 2013; Jones, 2014; Rubble, 2014, Flintstone, 2015; Brady, Jetson, & Howser, 2016
This means no brackets at all, and the only way I can see doing it at this point in time is to suppress author, which isn't a great solution if I have to manually type in the names of 50 articles which aren't updated if something changes.
My SLR requires "normal" in-text citations as well as a list format with no brackets/parenthesis.
It would be nice if Zotero had the ability to select the format that the inserted reference was to use.
I can create a new discussion as a suggestion.
There are over 700 citation styles on there that are numeric styles of which hundreds will be superscript.
While I understand that it is extremely complex to automate, it seems to me that a solution is, as mentioned above, to have both a suppress author and a suppress date switch. That way I can put in both as separate citations but make them look like one. That allows me to add suffixes, genitive apostrophes, etc. manually after the field. If there is also the ability to omit brackets, it is much easier to add brackets manually than to add authors manually. The idea that adding authors manually can ever be a "best" way suggests that those making that recommendation don't have to use it much. Otherwise I assume the citation style could be amended to exclude brackets globally in that style.
There's a macro based workaround here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/73159/announcing-zoterzero-for-author-only-cites
If the macro doesn't work for you and this is otherwise a deal-breaker, I would switch to a different tool. Good chance this will happen in time for your dissertation, but absolutely no guarantees.