(Name, year) Vs Name (year)

hlyiu88
In writing papers, it is common to cite literature in two different styles:

1. Name (year) argued bla bla bla
2. Bla Bla Bla (Name, year)

Right now the only way to do #1 is to cite it and do a manual edit by pressing the "Show editor" every time it is needed.

Would there be any better way (automatic way) to improve the writing productivity instead of manually edit every time?

Or did I miss any hidden feature of Zotero?

HL
  • adamsmith
    use suppress author in the plugin, write the Name out in word.
  • hlyiu88
    That mean it must still be done by manual. Wouldn't it be possible to select it automatically as a future function?

    This problem came up when I upgraded to 2.11 and Firefox 4, all my citation Name (year) has been converted to (Name, year) for some reasons. I have to manually re-type everyone which is very troublesome!

    Any clue? Please advise.

    HL
  • fbennett
    edited March 31, 2011
    adamsmith's advice is the best. There is a "Suppress author" tick-box in the popup that appears when you edit a citation. Possibly the value was stored differently in 2.0.9 documents, which would explain the effect you describe. If you would like the developers to investigate, got to the gear menu -> Preferences -> Advanced, "Enable debug log on startup", restart Zotero, refresh your document, then return to the Advanced panel and file a Debug ID. Post the ID back to these forums. Filing the ID will send a report to the developers, so they can see what your document is sending to Zotero.

    (Edit: Note that by filing a report in this case might be beneficial to other users as well, who might be affected.)
  • adamsmith
    edited March 31, 2011
    If you used show editor to get name (year) that should work again in the new release (2.1.2). Note, though, that this is not the recommended way to do this.

    Otherwise no, I don't think this will be done automatically - it's a tricky question, but essentially, when you write
    "according to Smith (1776) the division of labor is awesome"
    Smith is a necessary part of the sentence and should thus be written in the text editor. There are alternative solutions, but they include a lot of trade-offs. If you're interested search the forum for more, this has been discussed at great length.

    Edit: Frank - I think this is likely due to the bug that didn't display show editor changes in updated documnets, fixed for 2.1.2.
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