Disambiguate bug

johncolby
Hello. I have been using Zotero frequently and very much enjoy it. I'm using 2.0.3, with MacWord Integration 3.0b2. I ran into a problem with the disambiguate function, however, and I was hoping for some help. Say I have 6 journal articles, 2 each from 3 years, which gives 3 pairs that need to be disambiguated:

J Colby et al. 2001
J Colby et al. 2001
J Colby et al. 2002
J Colby et al. 2002
J Colby et al. 2003
J Colby et al. 2003

If I select any one of the three pairs in the test pane, Zotero will disambiguate the 2 articles fine with styles like Harvard Reference format 1 (Author-Date). However, if I select more than one pair, the disambiguation will not happen. Either it will not disambiguate any of them (i.e. it will look like my example input, above), or it will only disambiguate one of the pairs. Is this a known bug? Are there any workarounds?

I am happy to upload a small library to you if that would be useful in figuring this out.

Thank you,

John
  • fbennett
    Do you get the same behavior in a document? I seem to remember that disambiguation sometimes behaves differently in the test pane.

    If there is a subtle issue behind this, it probably won't be fixed in the current processor, as it is slated for replacement and no longer supported. Disambiguation behavior of the new processor (of which I am the author) is well tested, and I am pretty confident that it will do the right thing under the conditions you describe.
  • johncolby
    Thanks for the quick response. It does give the same behavior in a document. Another thing that may be involved is that the first word of the article title is the same for an article in each of the three pairs.

    That is excellent that the new processor is looking good! Thank you!

    For what it's worth, I found a workaround to this problem: When I tweaked the first author names for the pairs to be subtly different from each other, then the disambiguation works fine for all of them. Ex: "Colby J1" for the first pair, "Colby J2" for the second pair, etc.. This seems to solve my problem...as long as I don't ever need to print out the whole first name field.
  • bmcm

    For what it is worth: I believe I have encountered the same problem. In my case I have three papers by a single author; two in 1999, one in 2002. I'm using the harvard1 style. The two 1999 papers were not being disambiguated. After a lot of testing I found that the problem arose due to the rules in harvard1.csl for sorting the bibliography: these are to sort first by author name and then by article title (not by year, as I would have expected). With the particular titles in question, this meant that, in the bibliography, the 2002 paper was being sorted in between the two 1999 papers. It then seems that the disambiguation algorithm only picks up potential ambiguity if papers are immediately adjacent in the order of the bibliography.

    I finally resolved this by creating a local customised version of harvard1.csl; in the <bibliography> element I replaced:


    <sort>
    <key macro="author"/>
    <key variable="title"/>
    </sort>

    with:


    <sort>
    <key macro="author"/>
    <key variable="year" sort="descending"/>
    <key variable="title"/>
    </sort>

    Note: if you want to try modifying your own csl, please check out the documentation on creating/modifying zotero styles first.

    I don't know if this will still be an issue with the anticipated "new" zotero csl processor (I'm using zotero 2.0.3); but in fact I prefer this ordering for the bibliography anyway, so I'm going to stick with it...

    Regards - Barry.

  • fbennett
    I don't know if this will still be an issue with the anticipated "new" zotero csl processor
    It won't be. :)
  • nikolai.ro
    edited September 4, 2010
    I sorted after the model above and it worked.
    I made un update with the latest version (2.0.6) and didn't worked.
    What can I do?
  • fbennett
    This is probably due to a sort bug that affects this version. A patch was introduced in a recent release (thanks to me, I'm embarrassed to say), which messed up sorting. We think the issues have been solved in the latest 2.0 development xpi. Please install it and try again. If it fixes the issue, please report your findings to the troubleshooting thread for this issue.

    The current 2.0 development xpi should be safe to use, but when the next main version is released, follow the advice here when you upgrade.
  • nikolai.ro
    edited September 4, 2010
    I installed the latest 2.0 development xpi, but this did not solved the problem.
    it sorts only after the first key...
  • fbennett
    edited September 4, 2010
    Can you post your style file as a gist, and post the link here?

    http://gist.github.com/
  • nikolai.ro
    I use http://www.zotero.org/styles/inter-ro/dev with a different sort-key:

    <sort>
    <key variable="note" sort="ascending"/>
    <key variable="archive_location" sort="ascending"/>
    <key macro="author" sort="ascending"/>
    <key macro="title" sort="ascending"/>
    </sort>
  • fbennett
    Thanks for this additional info. I'm pretty sure that I've identified the underlying source of the issue that prompted the original patch, and I've posted a revised patch for review. (My track record over the past few days has not been good, so feel free to take that with a grain of salt.)

    To be sure, I've built a style file by combining the code that you posted with the published version of inter-ro.csl. In a small document that exercises the sort keys, it seems to work fine with the patch I've just filed. Please bear with us, but this should heal soon.
  • nikolai.ro
    I hope very soon!
  • dstillman
    dranik: Update to the latest 2.0 Branch dev xpi and try again.
  • nikolai.ro
    It works. Many thanks!
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