Inline citation style

I'm trying to figure out how to change the style of inline citation uses. Currently I have this sentence:

(Hillman, Castelli, & Buck, 2005) showed similar benefits using...

but I'd like to change it to:

Hillman, Castelli, & Buck (2005) showed similar benefits using...

The latter feels more like APA style and works nicer at the beginning of sentences. Is there a way to change this?
  • edited March 29, 2017
    In the Insert Ciration window, click on the blue bubble for the citation and choose Suppress Author. Then manually type the author names in the text of your document.

    (Note that APA specifies you should use "and" rather than "&" when typing authors in text like this.)
  • Is there no way to tie it directly to the field zotero uses? Because if I ever wanted to delete or change the citation I would have the manually typed names floating around in the document
  • not really, no. But the way you'd delete the citation would just be to delete it in the Word document anyway, so I don't really see how that would be any different depending on whether the authors are part of a Zotero-generated citation or written out by you.

    (We may eventually add an option for these types of citations and there are some reasons -- such as adjust et al -- you may want them to be generated by Zotero, but that's not going to be any time very soon).
  • @simonho213 If in your document you use only inline citation in format "names (year)", then you can change style template. But I think it is not a common situation. Automatic detection for usage "(names, year)" or "names (year)" is not possible, I think.
  • CSL (the programming language that Zotero uses for formatting citations) doesn't support this type of formatting currently. As @adamsmith mentioned, there is a possibility that this support may be added in the future, but that will not happen very soon. There are a lot of details about various formatting options that need to be considered before support can be added. For comparison, in my experience, non-CSL citation software that does support this type of formatting (e.g., Endnote), doesn't do so particularly reliably.
  • edited March 30, 2017
    @bwiernik I think that code
    <layout delimiter="; ">
    <group delimiter=" ">
    <text macro="author-short"/>
    <text macro="issued-year" prefix="(" suffix=")"/>
    </group>
    <text macro="citation-locator" prefix=":"/>
    </layout>

    creates output in "names (year)" format. But, of course, for all inline citation in the document.
  • That code will produce this in the case of multi-source citations:

    Johnson et al. (2006); Smith & Jones (2005); Harper (2006)

    which is really not helpful in any situation. You can certainly create code like this, but it will be very inflexible (e.g., as you can see, it would be hard to handle multi-source citations well). Also, as you note, you cannot have both Author (Year) and (Author, Year) style citations automatically formatted in the same document. I think that cases where someone would want only Author (Year) style references are extremely rare, so Zotero and CSL's current default behavior for styles to support (Author, Year) automatically and to do Author (Year) through suppress-author is probably the most efficient.

    Certainly, I would love for CSL to support both citation styles. Adding this support to the language, though, requires both deciding exactly how formatting would work (e.g., how should they be coded, how this code should be interpreted by processors, deciding what edge cases need to be supported, identifying the diversity of formatting variations that exist) and updating many existing styles to add the new formatting styles. So, there is a lot of work to do on this, so it will be a long time until full support for both formats will be added.
  • Part of the thing to figure out would be how to support the feature while retaining a core CSL design goal: that an author can switch between note-based and other (author-date, etc.) styles without modifying the document source.

    I've always assumed it wasn't possible, but I could be wrong.
  • edited April 12, 2017
    I think that's actually feasible by keeping the author in the text for all types of citation styles if the options (author-in-text or whatever we'd call it) is toggled, so it would create

    Smith (1776) for author-date
    Smith [1] for numeric and
    Smith{FN} for note based styles

    This is a fairly massive change, but actually would be an improvement in terms of switching back and forth to the status quo, where you get
    Smith {FN} for the last case.
  • I do remember the issue is complicated by the subject of this discussion (citations that get footnoted vs citations within footnotes):

    https://groups.google.com/d/topic/pandoc-discuss/MNJqCSZImJ0/discussion
  • Guys any update?
  • HI All: I have a question regarding a citation like this one: (for details, see (Castillo-Jordán et al., 2022), where there is an extra parenthesis right before the name. Can I eliminate this, or is it not an option? Thanks.

    Great tool.
  • As answered above, you have to use the Omit Author option (used be called Suppress Author, as mentioned above). You will have to manually type "Castillo-Jordán et al., " before "(year)", which will be inserted by Zotero.

    See the documentation, specifically under Narrative Citations with Omit Author ("According to Smith (1776)")

    https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage

    (For devs: In that documentation page, there is still the mention of "Suppress Author" near the end of the page, and one of the snapshots of the Add Citation bubble still shows "Suppress Author".)
  • If I do that, it will still leave the (2022) in an extra parenthesis. I want the citation to look like this (for details, see Castillo-Jordán et al., 2022), but as you propose, it will look like this (for details, see Castillo-Jordán et al., (2022). Correct? Thanks for your input.
  • same documentation page describes that. You don't use omit author, you just put "for details, see" in the prefix.
  • Understood. Thanks for your patience. Great tool.
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