Unnecessary year in Chicago Style footnotes

edited 4 days ago
I'm having an issue with the following style: "Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (full note, with ibid.)" I'm using the Zotero desktop app and the Word plug-in on a Mac. The problem is this: When I insert a footnote referring to a work I've previously cited, I *usually* get the correct short-form citation (e.g., "Kafka, Letters to Felice, 540–42."), but for certain books Zotero adds the year of publication between the title and the page number (e.g., "Kafka, Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, 1971, 238."). I can't see any reason that Zotero would be treating different works in different ways. I entered the information into Zotero in the same way for all of the works, I'm creating the footnotes in the same way for all of the works, but I can't get Zotero to stop adding unnecessary dates to a random subset of those works. And it's always the same works--Zotero always adds the year of publication for some works, and never adds it for the others, but it's consistent for each individual work. I know that I could manually delete the years once I unlink the citations, but that's a tedious process to go through for an entire book, and I could easily miss some, so I'd rather find a solution that would be a universal fix. Any ideas about how I could fix this?
  • A quick look at the style sheet shows that a date will be printed if either of the following is true:

    1. Your cited references include two or more items with the same author and short title
    2. The item is classed as "personal communication" in your Zotero library

    See the style sheet chicago-fullnote-bibliography-with-ibid.csl, line 330, available at
    https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles
  • Thank you, this solved the problem! I had added the same works to My Library and to a Group Library (entering them separately each place, not just dragging the copy from My Library to the Group Library), and I'd accidentally used both entries at different times instead of consistently using the same one. Once I went through and switched all of the citations to the same entry, the extraneous dates stopped appearing. Thanks so much for the helpful response! (I'm still getting doubled years for an artwork -- it says "1836, 1836" even though I've only entered the date in one field -- but since there are only a couple of artworks cited in the book, I'm just going to correct those manually.)
  • (The artwork thing is a bug, I'm pretty sure; it's fixed in the 18th edition style which we'll release soon)
  • The extra date you’re seeing in shortened notes is the style trying to disambiguate two items that you have cited with the same author and short title. I’ve overhauled disambiguation in the new style to prioritize more relevant information such as part numbers and editors in the 18th edition.
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