2.1b7 Author field behaves differently

meelis.friedenthal
In Z 2.0.9 I used some additional information in author field (eg ERAF, f. 1, n. 4, s. 5350) and for my purposes it served the need and it was in citations displayed correctly. Since doing the update to 2.1b7 the field behaves differently and now I only get some of the information in author field (ERAF, s. 5350). Seems that characters between commas are removed. Is this a bug?
  • fbennett
    Well, that's certainly an unexpected use case. :)

    The behavior you're seeing is caused by an undocumented feature of the citation processor, intended for the support of institutional authors. It is treating the middle portion of the string as a set of intervening committees, with the ultimate subcommittee on the left, and the overall institution on the right.

    You can get the literal content to render by placing double quotation marks around the content of the field. That's a workaround, but since your field content is already very non-standard, that may be an adequate solution.
  • meelis.friedenthal
    Thanks. I know it's a bit unexpected to enter information this way, but the problem is that I had to get archive citations in the format ERAF, f. 1, n. 4, s. 5350, p.23 displaying the location in archive and the page number after that. When location info is in the "loc. in Archive" (ie correct) field it is however displayed with all the citation formats I tested after the page nr. I could have asked some help to modify the citation format but instead opted for (easier but hacky solution) using the other/wrong field. I have several hundred such citations and it would be quite time consuming to use the method of quotation marks you proposed. I suppose it would be possible to make some changes directly into zotero sql database, but I also know that this is discouraged. Would there be some possibility to automate the task? Or to move (automatically) the data into another field?
  • ajlyon
    You'd have to do this by modifying the database directly. It can be safe-- just close Firefox and make a backup first.
  • adamsmith
    in hindsight, going for a different citation style would probably have been the better idea... - probably would have been 15mins of work - using software in a hacky/unintended way always has the danger of breaking

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