Wrong alphabet label when citing the same first author in the same year

YingjieLi
edited November 12, 2021
Hi, see the example below. The citation in line 1 should use "a" first, while Zotero mistakenly labels the intended citation as "b". Any solutions? Thanks!!!

*** an example in a document**
Line1: I want to cite this first (Xu et al. 2020b)

Line 2: and this one is the second (Xu et al. 2020a)


References
Xu Z, Chau SN, Chen X, et al (2020a) Assessing progress towards sustainable development over space and time. Nature 577:74–78. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1846-3
Xu Z, Li Y, Chau SN, et al (2020b) Impacts of international trade on global sustainable development. Nat Sustain 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0572-z
  • adamsmith
    This isn't wrong -- the items are sorted alphabetically by second author in the reference list and that determines the application of a and b. It's possible to modify the citation style if you really need it to, but it's fairly involved in this case. Are you sure you need this changed?
  • YingjieLi
    Yes! I still need to figure out how to change this, as this format is deemed as wrong in my disciplines (environmental science, broadly speaking).

    For the example above, if the first time of citation - "Impacts of international trade ..." - was mentioned earlier than the citation - "Assessing progress towards..." in a document, then the former one should be marked as "a", instead of "b". Could you help with this?
  • adamsmith
    Which citation style? A
    nd, out of curiosity, how do you know (or why do you think) that this is deemed wrong in your disciplines. I've read a lot of style guides and very, very few go into this level of detail.
  • YingjieLi
    Ok, maybe I did not express the issue clearly. here is a more explicit example, you might notice citation labeled with "b" is ahead of citation labeled with "a" , which is not logical at all. The same thing for referring to a subplot in our manuscript, you can not mention figure 1b first and then mention figure 1a.

    Hope this example can explain the issue well.

    I used Endnote, and there is no such issue.

    By the way, here I choose the citation style of "Landscape Ecology", but the same result is if choosing other similar journals.

    Thanks!


    ----------------------------------------
    This is the article title

    Introduction
    Currently, the spatial mismatch between water and animal production in China has posed a great problem for the common security of food and water (Xu et al. 2020b). Specially, the water resources in northern China are facing severer challenges due to the poor physical water condition and the increasing virtual water outflow (Xu et al. 2020a). To analyze the characteristics of …

    ....


    References
    Xu Z, Chau SN, Chen X, et al (2020a) Assessing progress towards sustainable development over space and time. Nature 577:74–78. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1846-3
    Xu Z, Li Y, Chau SN, et al (2020b) Impacts of international trade on global sustainable development. Nat Sustain 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0572-z

  • adamsmith
    I really understand the issue, but from my perspective, what wouldn't make any sense is to have the order of items in the bibliography diverge from alphabetical (by title in your second example) because of the order items appear in the text.

    For the major citation styles that do explicitly address this, APA and Chicago Manual, the above is correct.

    I can give you some code to modify citation styles to do this by order of appearance tomorrow, but I'm still curious why you are so sure that's correct
  • YingjieLi
    Because putting b ahead of a is just not logical to me. Perhaps the example I gave above is rare, but I have never seen such examples in publications. I totally understand the current code ranks by the last name of the first author, year, and then the 2nd author, but still, I just feel putting b ahead of a is not correct and senior professors in our group also ask me to correct this. It sounds great if any code can help address this. Thank you so much!

  • adamsmith
    Using this as the sort section for the bibliography should basically work:
    <sort>
    <key macro="author" names-min="1" names-use-first="1"/>
    <key variable="citation-number"/>
    <key macro="author"/>
    <key variable="title"/>
    </sort>

    General instructions here: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step

    Note that in order to modify Landscape Ecology, the style you're actually modifying is "Springer - Basic (author-date)"
  • YingjieLi
    Thank you so much!!! The code works perfectly.
  • PierrOcean
    Hi, also in environmental science (and the case is similar largely in Biology), citations by the same authors and in the same year are listed in order of appearance of the short citation in the text, as explained by YingjieLi.

    Many journals in Biology either list the full author list in the bibliography, or most often only cite the first author before "et al." for more than 2 authors.

    Landscape Ecology seems to have gone for something in between where in the text you will use the short citation (first author + et al.), but in the biblio, you can either cite all authors, or cite the first three with "et al." for long author lists.
    However, their guideline states that the first author and chronology prevails in that case ("For more than two authors, by name of first author, then chronologically.").

    From what I've seen in the field, citations from the same authors (as seen in the short citation format), and from the same year, will be sorted by order of appearance in the text. It looks weird in the case of Landscape Ecology because the first author will prevail despite citing the second and third authors in the bibliography.

    In the example, 2020a will appear first in the bibliography if it appears first in the text, with disregard to the second or following authors.

    In most journals it will look as such:
    References
    Xu Z et al. (2020a) Assessing progress towards sustainable development over space and time. Nature 577:74–78. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1846-3
    Xu Z et al. (2020b) Impacts of international trade on global sustainable development. Nat Sustain 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0572-z

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