initialize-with not working

divadnagrom
Can someone please explain the initialize-with option for author names?

As best I can tell given an author "Greg Caroll Rowling" and Initialize-with set to ". " I should get G. C. Rowling. Is this correct?

I do not have this happening at the moment. Is it my data entry or the citation style output?
  • erickb
    Hello, I am also having this problem, and I wish that someone had responded. My stylesheet is working very well, except for this one issue. For example, I have:

    <macro name="contributors">
    <names variable="author">
    <name and="text" name-as-sort-order="all" sort-separator=", " delimiter=", " initialize-with="." delimiter-precedes-last="always"/>
    <label form="verb-short" prefix=", " suffix="." text-case="lowercase"/>
    <substitute>
    <text macro="editor"/>
    <text macro="translator"/>
    </substitute>
    </names>
    <text macro="anon"/>
    <text macro="recipient"/>
    </macro>

    But authors are being formatted as:

    Carter, Michael R., and Barrett, Christopher B. (2006) The Economics of Poverty Traps and Persistent Poverty: An Asset-based Approach. Journal of Development Studies, 42, 178-199.

    rather than with initials.

    Any help would be very much appreciated.
  • adamsmith
    this really should and does work. Post your whole style to gist.github.com as a public gist and post a link here so we can have a look.
  • erickb
    OK, here it is... thanks in advance!

    https://gist.github.com/945241

    You will also see that I could use some help with giving proper attribution to the author of the stylesheet that I'm basing mine off of.
  • erickb
    FYI, I'm still curious about the answer to this, but I'm using a different stylesheet as a model, with a style that's closer to the house style I'm trying to match.
  • fbennett
    The style you posted is not valid CSL, which is likely to cause strange misbehavior. You would need to change "if" to "else-if" at or about lines 155 and 157. It's always a good idea to validate styles before use. Information is available at citationstyles.org.
  • adamsmith
    and to give credit to other authors, move them to a contributor field, e.g.
    <contributor>
    <name>Julian Onions</name>
    </contributor>

    see e.g. the APA style for an example of multiple contributors.
  • erickb
    Thanks very much. I'm correcting the credit and also validating my new version. (Oops.)
  • Lubos
    The same issue here with Zotero 2.1.6.

    My style is at: http://www.zotero.org/styles/unisa-harvard/dev

    The given names appear in full although initialize-with has been included.
    BTW, when looking at the preview at http://www.zotero.org/styles (mouse hovering) the given name gets abbreviated correctly.
  • fbennett
    @Lubos, the issue raised in this thread (by the second poster) was resolved, and found to be due to an error in the style file, not the processor. Your style (like all styles straight off of the repository) does validate, so this is a separate issue, and you should start a separate thread.

    It does seem, though, that this is just disambiguation at work.

    http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/given_name_disambiguation
  • Lubos
    Thanks Frank. I thought there must have been something obviously wrong with the validity of the style that I could not figure out.

    Anyway, I have opened a new thread: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/18211/nesting-nonshorthand-version-of-names-inside-substitute/
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