Citation style disambiguation problem after Zotero upgrade(s)
Hi everyone, I started experiencing a problem with my citation style(s) after upgrading Zotero.
I normally use a slightly modified version of the CMS citation style for my thesis where the bibliography is supposed to look something like this:
Mundell, Robert. 1973. Plan for a European Currency.
Mundell, Robert A. 1961. “A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas” ...
Both papers were written by the same author, even though his personal name is written slightly differently. After upgrading Zotero, however, I am getting this:
Mundell, R. 1973. Plan for a European Currency.
Mundell, RA. 1961. “A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas” ...
Only entries that require disambiguation are affected, other entries haven't changed. The same issue appears with the default CMS, APA and Vancouver style presets. I am not sure when exactly this began, but it seems to have started after upgrading Zotero's Firefox plugin to version 2.1.4. I am currently running Zotero 2.1.5 on an Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) Linux machine with OpenOffice 3.2.1 and the Zotero OpenOffice Integration plugin 3.5.a1.
Could someone please give advice on what might have caused the problem and if there is a workaround available? If possible, is there a place where I can download older Zotero versions and downgrade to a version <2.1.4 until this is fixed?
I normally use a slightly modified version of the CMS citation style for my thesis where the bibliography is supposed to look something like this:
Mundell, Robert. 1973. Plan for a European Currency.
Mundell, Robert A. 1961. “A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas” ...
Both papers were written by the same author, even though his personal name is written slightly differently. After upgrading Zotero, however, I am getting this:
Mundell, R. 1973. Plan for a European Currency.
Mundell, RA. 1961. “A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas” ...
Only entries that require disambiguation are affected, other entries haven't changed. The same issue appears with the default CMS, APA and Vancouver style presets. I am not sure when exactly this began, but it seems to have started after upgrading Zotero's Firefox plugin to version 2.1.4. I am currently running Zotero 2.1.5 on an Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) Linux machine with OpenOffice 3.2.1 and the Zotero OpenOffice Integration plugin 3.5.a1.
Could someone please give advice on what might have caused the problem and if there is a workaround available? If possible, is there a place where I can download older Zotero versions and downgrade to a version <2.1.4 until this is fixed?
All old Zotero versions are for download using
http://www.zotero.org/download/zotero-z.z.z.xpi
where the zs are the version number
2.1.3, e.g. is
http://www.zotero.org/download/zotero-2.1.3.xpi
a downgrade to any 2.1.x version is no problem. 2.0.x versions are trickier.
Do you know when 2.1.6 will be released? I'll give the new version a try and see if that fixes the problem.
Cheers
http://www.zotero.org/download/dev/zotero-2.1-branch.xpi
should be safe, but back-up nonetheless.
However, there seems to be an issue with disambiguation of citations where names aren't displayed in full. For example, where I would expect to see
(Robert Mundell, 1973)
I only get (R Mundell, 1973) with the CMS style (author-date format) or (R. Mundell, 1973) with the APA style (6th ed.). And where I would expect to see
(Robert A. Mundell, 1961)
I only get (RA Mundell, 1961) or (R. A. Mundell, 1961) respectively.
I have checked this with the most recent CSL style definitions (https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles) and the Zotero Test Pane (chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul). Switching through the various citation styles I noticed that all default styles (except for the CMS note-bibliography style, which doesn't use disambiguation) display only an abbreviation of the given name.
I am pretty sure that this hadn't been the case before (see this previous post: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/16321/changing-the-citation-format-for-author-disambiguation/). Is this behaviour related to the update to CSL 1.0 and intended? If so, could you please give me a hint on how to change the CSL style definition file to achieve the desired disambiguation format?
Anyway, thank you for working on this problem. Please let me know if I can be of any help. I'd be glad to help wherever I can.
thanks!
after upgrading to all the newest versions with word 2007, i became an error message: this.style is undefined. Same message in a new document, different styles worked. I reinstalled everything. Does not help.
In the mean time i did reset translators and styles, and now i cannot even find the style i was using. Do you have any idea what I might try or how to fix the problem?
If it was a style from the repository you should be able to reinstall it from there.
That's the way I remember the intended logic, anyway.
So cites requiring disambiguation in CMoS should appear either as family-name+initials, or a full-name, whichever is necessary. Cites requiring disambiguation in APA should appear as full-name.
Is that not what is happening? Or if it is, is some other behavior desired?
(Smith, 1776) - neither has initials in the base form.
With disambiguation, APA should do (and does!)
(A. Smith 1776; V. Smith 2003)
as should, as I've just found out, CMS (15.21): So for CMS we're just missing a period for initialize with in the style and we're good, I'll fix this asap.
This is not the behavior I would have expected, though - I'd have thought disambiguation just defaults to the long form of the author when called - i.e. initials when there is an 'initialize-with' term, full first name when there isn't. I'm pretty sure that's what it used to do in Zotero 2.0.x - I guess the question is if there are any styles that require full first name disambiguation where an initial would do - at least APA and CMS don't - hope that makes sense.
The behavior could be shifted to jump to the full form, but if it's right for Chicago with the current algorithm I'll stand pat unless we hear complaints.
https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles
(we've gotta get this repository situation solved - I feel like I'm juggling an increasingly untenable number of balls/citation styles)
If I understand you correctly, this is not a problem of Zotero but intended behaviour by the APA and CMS (author-date) csl styles? I remember modifying the original APA style before upgrading to the new Zotero version (see http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/16321/changing-the-citation-format-for-author-disambiguation/) to display disambiguations as (Smith, John, 2010). If this is what broke, I am sorry for causing confusion.
One of the reasons I need to display the full name in disambiguations right away is because my database includes various works by Asian authors, whose names are written in Chinese and Japanese characters and can't really be abbreviated. Is there a way to force this behaviour with the most recent APA and CMS (author-date) csl styles from https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles ?
If you require more elaborate discrimination in the formatting of references containing Chinese or Japanese script, there are ways to accomplish that, but they are experimental and non-standard (at present). A recently posted screencast (by me, in my own wheezy voice) from Debbie Maron's Multilingual Zotero blog post provides an overview. The platform is experimental, but it provides pretty sound multilingual coverage.
However, Multilingual Zotero is still in beta and not intended for production use, like you said. So I am currently still using the default Zotero version and normally attach the author's full Chinese or Japanese name to his given name, like this:
Author's family name: Yu
Author's personal name: Yongding 余永定
Obviously, this is not a very clean solution and causes a few problems. But it's sufficient for what I am trying to do.
The above author shows up as Yu, Yongding 余永定 (2009) [...] in the bibliography, which is the formatting I need. When citing this reference I get "(Yu, 2009)", which is fine as well. However, when disambiguating between this and another author named "Yu", Zotero produces this: (Y. 余永定 Yu, 2009)
My university requires that I put the full name in this case, though, with the family name coming first. I would need (Yu, Yongding 余永定, 2009), but so far I have only been able to rearrange the name order and got (Yu, Y. 余永定, 2009). I still haven't been able to get Zotero to give me the full given name. Is this something I can change via the csl style definition?
By default, APA displays names in the bibliography as follows:
Yu, J. (2010). [...]
Yu, Y. 余永定. (2009). [...]
And disambiguations as:
(J. Yu, 2010)
(Y. 余永定 Yu, 2009)
First, I removed "initialize-with" from the author macro, which controls how names are displayed in the bibliography: <macro name="author"><names variable="author"><name name-as-sort-order="all" and="symbol" sort-separator=", " delimiter=", " delimiter-precedes-last="always"/> ...
This changes the bibliography to:
Yu, Jie. (2010). [...]
Yu, Yongding 余永定. (2009) [...]
Disambiguation remains unchanged.
Then, I removed "initialize-with" from the author-short macro, which should have an impact on disambiguations: <macro name="author-short"><names variable="author"><name form="short" and="symbol" delimiter=", " /> ...
But this only changes disambiguations to
(J Yu, 2010)
(Y余永定 Yu, 2009)
Since this wasn't what I wanted, I modified the author-short macro a little more until the name tag looked like this:
<name form="long" and="symbol" delimiter=", " name-as-sort-order="all" sort-separator=", "/>
Finally, I removed the option disambiguate-add-givenname
<option name="disambiguate-add-givenname" value="true"/>
This finally gave me the disambiguation format I wanted:
(Yu, Jie, 2010)
(Yu, Yongding 余永定, 2009)
Thank you for your help with this, fbennett. This finally solved my problem. I hope this little guide will be helpful to someone.
It seems to me that the processor did once behave as I described, though. I'm not sure whether the use of abbreviations even when there is no initialize-with attribute is an accidental regression, whether it was changed to track what the CSL 2.0.9 processor did in that case, or whether my memory is just faulty. I'll take it up in the CSL group, and see whether it's possible to restore/add that (simpler and more flexible) behavior.
I am pretty sure that Zotero did once give me the citations in the correct format, though, i.e. printing the full first name in case a citation required disambiguation, since this is the reason I actually started this thread.
Thanks for following up on this. I'll keep tracking this topic and try out new versions of Zotero and the csl definitions to see if this makes a difference.
(Mundell, Robert, 1973)
(Mundell, Robert A., 1961)
(Yu, Jie, 2010)
(Yu, Yongding, 2009)
To achieve this disambiguation style, the line "<name form="short" and="symbol" delimiter=", " initialize-with=". "/>" in the APA style needs to be changed to: <name form="short" and="symbol" delimiter=", " name-as-sort-order="all" sort-separator=", "/>
Thanks for fixing this, guys!