Date field passthrough issue after updating to Zotero 2.1

Here is a pretty ugly problem that appears after upgrading to Zoter 2.1. This is a problem in Word documents, so probably to do with the CSL1.0 implementation in the Word plugin.

I suddenly find that a cite that appeared as "Jakobson 1980" now shows up as "Jakobson Autumn" in my document (CMoS, Harvard, MLA, Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics all have this problem). The date field tells me that this record has "Autumn, 1980" in the db, parsed as "y". This is as imported by the JSTOR translator.

Is this intended behaviour? I hope not! I think many people are going to be hit by this problem. Worse, one is not aware of it until one actually stumbles upon a cite that used to look right but now comes out as "Author, Season"!
  • This does sounds like an unintended side effect of the literal date passthrough for unparsed date elements that I think citeproc-js implements. Frank?
  • edited March 26, 2011
    (To be clear, I'm talking about in-text citations, not about the bibliography.)

    / edit, [expletive deleted], it is a problem in the bibliography too! So I get:

    Jakobson, Roman. Autumn. Subliminal Verbal Pattering in Poetry. Poetics Today, 2, 127-136.

    This is Winword integration 31b1 in Word 2002.
  • but shouldn't that recognize autumn?
  • this is correctly displayed as 1980 in the bibliography?
  • citeproc-js's date parser does recognize seasons, but I think Zotero is still using its internal date parser for now... In other words, I have no idea. We'll have to wait for Dan and Simon to show up here.
  • edited March 26, 2011
    I've checked this, and can confirm that in Zotero 2.1.1, a date entered as "Autumn 2001" in the date field of a book item with author "Smith, John" comes out as "(Smith Autumn)" in Chicago Author-Date.

    The multilingual version shows the same behavior out of the box, but when run with the citeproc-js date parser (controlled by the hidden preference in the patch discussed here), the citation comes out as "(Smith 2001)" (no [expletive deleted]!).

    It looks like this is a bug in the Zotero date parser.
  • the fact that it's in the bibliography, too, is actually a good sign - that means ajlyon is probably right and this shouldn't be too hard to fix.
  • Okay, thanks for checking. I really hope this'll be solved soon, it seems pretty serious also in terms of backward compatibility.
  • Fixed on the trunk.
  • Not sure if this is the same issue, but I'm using 2.1.6 and find that original dates of publication are not passing through to in-text citations. In my library, I have entries for an author (let's call her Smith) with original date of publication in brackets. I'm expecting to see Smith 2005 [1972],26 as the citation, but instead get Smith 2005,26. I'm using the American Journal of Archeology (author-date) (dev) style. Should I not expect the original date of publication to pass through to the in-text citation? Thanks.
  • Original date of publication hasn't been added to Zotero yet; it will probably come in the next major version, with a separate field.
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