Unwanted sorting by item type in bibliography

Mlester_Atwell
Hi,

I am using Zotero version 5.0.96.3 and the MS Word plug-in to cite references in the Council of Science Editors (author-date) style.

I recently discovered that for a given author, some references are not appearing in the order I expected in the bibliography (i.e., by ascending year). I was able to figure out that this is related to the "item type", since changing the item type would change the order in the bibliography. For a set of citations with the exact same author, it seems like documents, reports, maps, and statutes will collectively appear together first in the correct order (i.e., by ascending year), followed by all the web pages. The web pages will be in the correct order among that particular item type, but are not necessarily in order when taken in combination with all references by the same author. For example, a set of citations with the exact same author may appear in the following order:

2012 (map)
2017 (document)
2020a (document)
2021a (map)
2021b (map)
2021c (document)
2016 (webpage)
2020b (webpage)
2021d (webpage).

Is this normal for the CSE style? If so, is there a way to change the sorting preferences so that item type is taken out of the equation? Thanks!
  • bwiernik
    The Council of Science Editors style sorts only by order of citation in the document
  • Mlester_Atwell
    I'm not familiar with the details of all of the styles, so forgive me, but wouldn't that just be if I were using one of the CSE Citation-Sequence styles? I'm using the CSE Name-Year (author-date) style, which, for the most part, is sorting the bibliography alphabetically by author then date (regardless of the order of citations in-text). However, there are a few cases where the dates are out of order (as in my example above). I am also able to "fix" the order in the bibliography without re-ordering citations in text by changing the "item type", so I don't think CSE only sorts by citation order in the document (unless I'm misunderstanding or there's some glitch). I would like to figure out how to fix the bibliography order without changing the "item type."
  • bwiernik
    CSE (author-date) sorts by author, then date. After that, the order is determined only by the order you cited them in the document. It’s entirely a coincidence that this is by item type in your case.

    <sort>
    <key macro="author"/>
    <key macro="year-date"/>
    </sort>
  • Mlester_Atwell
    That makes sense, but the problem is that's not what's happening. It does sort by author first, but the years aren't always in order. In the example in my original post, the years go 2020>2021>2016>2020>2021 (all for the same author).

    Also, changing the item type field (without changing the order of citation in the document) changed the order in the bibliography, so it doesn't seem like it's just a coincidence.
  • adamsmith
    The year-date macro in CSE is a bit overloaded. I'd guess this goes away if we just go with key variable="issued"
  • Mlester_Atwell
    Thanks for the response! Is this something that I would need to do on my end or are you saying it's something for a future Zotero update? I don't really have any coding experience, but I may be able to figure out how to update the code with a little help.
  • adamsmith
    I should have a fix -- or at least what I think is one -- shortly.
  • adamsmith
    I just pushed out a version of the CSE (author-date) style that I think should fix this. It'll be available on zotero.org/styles shortly (check the timestamp)
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