# Different and= for narrative and parenthetical citations?

**URL:** <https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/different-and-for-narrative-and-parenthetical-citations/1453>\
**Category:** CSL Development\
**Created:** [October 6, 2017, 9:23am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/different-and-for-narrative-and-parenthetical-citations/1453 "2017-10-06T09:23:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 9\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Malte\_Roedl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecccb3/32.png) [@Malte\_Roedl](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Malte_Roedl)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2017, 9:23am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/different-and-for-narrative-and-parenthetical-citations/1453/1 "2017-10-06T09:23:40Z")

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Hello everyone,

according to the APA style guidelines, which have many adoptions in  
various CSL-styles, it is mandatory to have ‘and’ connecting authors in  
narrative, and ‘&’ connecting authors in parenthetical citations[1].

None of the styles I tried were accommodating for this rule.

So then I’ve tried to build a if-else-control structure to identify  
whether it is a narrative or a parenthetical citation, but it seems  
that the processor would do that automatically by using “prefix” and  
"suffix"?  
Is there any way to identify in the csl-file what type of citation is  
calling the evaluation?  
Or even better, is there already an existing style that accommodates  
for my issue (I could not find one, but that may be because of very  
vague and ubiquitous search terms).

Many thanks!  
Malte

[1] e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APA\_style#In-text\_citations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APA_style#In-text_citations)

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**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2017, 10:31am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/different-and-for-narrative-and-parenthetical-citations/1453/2 "2017-10-06T10:31:39Z")

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CSL has no concept of a “narrative citation,” which would explain why  
there’s no way to distinguish formatting based on it.

There’s been discussions about it, but am not remembering where we ended up.

If we don’t already have it, we should have a general issue ticket on  
GitHub for the broader feature, and include a note about this particular  
detail there.

Even if we label it “won’t fix,” at least we have the documentation in one  
place.

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**Author:** ![Malte\_Roedl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecccb3/32.png) [@Malte\_Roedl](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Malte_Roedl)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2017, 2:46pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/different-and-for-narrative-and-parenthetical-citations/1453/3 "2017-10-06T14:46:17Z")

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Thanks for your quick reply, Bruce.

I have created a github issue, but I could unfortunately not tag it as  
“wontfix” myself.

> <https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/issues/140>
>
> APA (and probably other citation styles) require to have an 'and' for narrative and an '&' for parenthetical citations\[1\]. (See also...

In my case, I will probably use latex (biblatex-apa) for this, as the  
journal is very picky about their citations.

In case anyone is interested, another option to solve this is to use  
and=“symbol” and use a regex for post-processing.  
This one works:  
“([&])(?=\s+(?:[\w-]+ ){1,3}[(])” -\> “and”  
(unless there are punctuation characters in between the ampersand and  
the year, e.g. for first names, or there is random ampersands followed  
by brackets in the text)

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**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2017, 2:57pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/different-and-for-narrative-and-parenthetical-citations/1453/4 "2017-10-06T14:57:02Z")

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To be clear, I’m not sure we won’t fix. It’s just a possibility.

This issue is tied into a somewhat complex issue: whether we support the  
feature (“narrative citations”), it needs to maintain a current original  
design goal, which is that an author can switch between note and other  
style types without editing their text.

I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile those in the past, but would be  
happy if someone did.

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**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2017, 3:05pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/different-and-for-narrative-and-parenthetical-citations/1453/5 "2017-10-06T15:05:46Z")

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I added the broader issue, and linked the two, here:

> <https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/issues/14>
>
> As suggested at http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg\_name=fbb7c5df0909211630o1848677bi85c4dc13df012ee2%40mail.gmail.com
> "scale" is a Zotero field for the Zotero Map item type, but doesn't have a matching CSL variable....

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**Author:** ![Sebastian\_Karcher](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/sebastian_karcher/32/176_2.png) [@Sebastian\_Karcher](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Sebastian_Karcher)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2017, 2:51pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/different-and-for-narrative-and-parenthetical-citations/1453/6 "2017-10-06T14:51:20Z")

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what reference manager are you using? Pandoc? E.g. in Zotero that whole  
idea doesn’t exist. You’d have to write out the narrative reference in the  
text. Which has its own downsides, e.g. won’t adapt to et al. rules if the  
citation moves.

I do think we’ll need to handle this. It’s one of the most frequent  
complaints on Zotero and as Malte notes, it cause reference managers that  
try to implement “narrative” citations to render incorrect citations.

Since it’s a relative big change, I’d not expect this to happen fast,  
though.

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**Author:** ![Malte\_Roedl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecccb3/32.png) [@Malte\_Roedl](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Malte_Roedl)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2017, 3:25pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/different-and-for-narrative-and-parenthetical-citations/1453/7 "2017-10-06T15:25:15Z")

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I use zotero and export to bibtex; then pandoc-citeproc runs over the  
references.  
I usually thought everything works well, until editors and supervisors  
complained about the incorrect citation style.

To make it compliant with APA, for now I run pandoc with `--biblatex`  
command so that it turns the [@cite1234] into latex citations, and then  
compile it with latexmk. Luckily, there is shell scripts to take care  
of that, so my workflow does not change too much. I just cannot use the  
word-output ‘correctly’ anymore then.

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**Author:** ![bwiernik](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/bwiernik/32/438_2.png) [@bwiernik](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/bwiernik)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2017, 4:52pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/different-and-for-narrative-and-parenthetical-citations/1453/8 "2017-10-06T16:52:42Z")

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The general idea that seems to have emerged from various discussion here and on the Zotero forums that styles would need to specify two different citation formats. For author-date styles, these would generally take the forms: (Author, Date) and Author (Date). For numeric and note styles, these would be: [1] and Author [1].

Supporting two formats like this in CSL would be excellent, as it would dramatically improve the ability of users to change styles quickly (at the moment, changing rules for “and” vs “&”, formatting rules for “et al.”, etc. must be manually adjusted for “narrative citations”). As Sebastian mentions, this is probably the single most requested feature/complaint from Zotero users.

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**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2017, 5:12pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/different-and-for-narrative-and-parenthetical-citations/1453/9 "2017-10-06T17:12:28Z")

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feel free to add notes to the issue(s).