Problem with rendering romanization of the Japanese author's name in citation key

Darren McDonald
I am having a problem rendering the romanization of Japanese (kanji) names in the citation key. Currently, Zotero, via the Better Bibtex plugin, is rendering the author's name into the romanization of Chinese, rather than the Japanese.

For example for "一小路武安2016日本における、、、" is being rendered as:
YiXiaoLu2016nihonniokeru...

This should be rendered as:
ichokoji2016nihonnniokeru...

Note this issue only affects the author's name, not the title.

In the Better Bibtex plugin preferences, I have checked the "Apply kuroshiro romanization in Japanese names/titles" under "Ideographs in citekeys".

Is this an issue that I have to direct the developer of the Better Bibtex plugin? If someone can help me on this forum I would be forever grateful.


  • adamsmith
    Yeah, definitely post this in the Better BibTeX GitHub as a new issue
  • emilianoeheyns
    What is the language of the item set to?
  • Darren McDonald
    @emilianoehenyns
    I changed language settings under Zotero>Settings...>Advanced>General>Micellaneous>Language.
    I changed this setting to 日本語 (Japanese), and added a new Japanese-language paper to Zotero. Unfortunately, this did not fix the issue.
    The only language setting I could find in Better BibTex was under Better BibTeX>Export>Fields>Export language as ... Changing this setting also did not solve the problem for.
    Is there another language somewhere else? Thank you, as always, for helping me out. :)

    @adamsmith
    I will see if @emilianoeheyns can help me solve this issue before posting in Better BibTeW as a new issue. Thank you always for you followup. :)
  • poettli
    edited September 12, 2023
    I guess emilianoeheyns is talking about the language in the item info (left-hand sidebar in the main window). It should be set to "ja". Also, in my case, using the kuroshiro romajization option (in Better BibTex preferences) seems to work.
  • adamsmith
    Emiliano created and maintains BetterBibTeX (i.e. is the same person as retorquere on github) and has mentioned many times that he prefers handling support there, so you'd likely just make it easier for him by moving things over there.
  • Darren McDonald
    @poettli
    That was it! Fixed immediately. Thank you for pointing this out to me.

    Just in case others search this forum with a similar issue:

    Make sure that the "Language" is filled in correctly in info>Language>[input "日本語” or "ja"].
    This info window appears for each item that you add to Zotero. In my case, it appears on the right-hand side of the main Zotero window when you select an item.

    Also, in the Better Bibtex plugin preferences, check the "Apply kuroshiro romanization in Japanese names/titles" under "Ideographs in citekeys".
    kuroshiro romajization option (in Better BibTex preferences).
  • Darren McDonald
    @adamsmith
    Understood. I will do for any future issues I may have. In this case, the issue was entirely my fault for not filling the "language" in the "info" window of the item. I now realize why I need to fill in this for each item. ;)
    Thank you again for following up on this issue.
  • emilianoeheyns
    Adamsmith is entirely right - I do my support on github, I have support tooling built around them that makes my life lots easier, and the zotero forums makes it hard for me to do tracking on what I have and haven't handled.

    I want to make support easily accessible for BBT users, and I realize many support requests do start here on the zotero forum, so I do light support here if and when I notice requests, but for anything beyond stuff that can be handled by knowledge of the arcana of BBT (like the effect filling the language field has on key generation), I will need to nudge people towards github, and I appreciate it when people do the nudging for me :)
  • poettli
    Sorry for bypassing the support process
  • Darren McDonald
    @emilianoeheyns
    Thank you for pointing out how support for BBT works. Apologies for not posting the issue on GitHub. I have since also posted this issue on BBT GitHub's forum together with the solution. I hope that this was the correct thing to do. Thanks for building and maintaining such an excellent plug-in! :)
    @poettli
    Thank you, again, for your reaching out on this forum. It helped me so much! It is entirely my own fault that this issue bypassed the support process. I am glad that the issue is solved and I am happily working away on my research.
    @adamsmith
    Thanks for all your help, not only with this issue but with other issues I have had in the past. Because of the great support I get from this forum, Zotero is a central tool I use endlessly to produce research. I do not know what I would do without you folk. :)

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