# disambiguate-add-date option?

**URL:** <https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496>\
**Category:** CSL Development\
**Created:** [July 30, 2008, 2:53pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496 "2008-07-30T14:53:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 20\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Elena\_Razlogova](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Elena\_Razlogova](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Elena_Razlogova)\
**Post date:** [July 30, 2008, 2:53pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/1 "2008-07-30T14:53:46Z")

</div>

This case came up in Zotero forums:

First time interview is cited in text: Rose Hill, interviewed by Mary  
Davis, transcript, May 13, 1928, University of Virginia Special  
Collections  
Next citation:  
Rose Hill, interview  
Problem:  
No date to distinguish between-  
First cite:  
Rose Hill, interviewed by Mary Davis, transcript, June 4, 1928,  
University of Virginia Special Collections  
Second cite:  
Rose Hill, interview

To distinguish between the two, the citation manager should add the  
date:

Rose Hill, interview, May 13, 1928

Since the date should only be added if there are multiple interviews  
with the same subject and interviewer, there should be something like  
disambiguate-add-date option in CSL. It would be relevant to letters  
with the same recipient and sender but different dates. Would it be  
possible to add this option?

Thanks!  
Elena

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<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [July 30, 2008, 3:43pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/2 "2008-07-30T15:43:27Z")

</div>

This makes sense, but there’s a little problem related to the previous  
discussion with Andrea: how would we specify the formatting of the  
date?

I’m not really clear: would the disambiguate prefix on the conditional  
work? I wasn’t the one the added the following, and so I’m not really  
clear:

## If text inside an block can be used to

## differentiate two otherwise identical citations, it will be added.

## If the citations remain identical after its addition, it will not

## be added.

Bruce

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Andrea\_Rossato1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e47774/32.png) [@Andrea\_Rossato1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Andrea_Rossato1)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2008, 10:58am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/3 "2008-08-01T10:58:12Z")

</div>

I would suggest to adopt a very careful approach with this.

I’ve been struggling in search of a nice and efficient way of  
implementing disambiguation options and I’m coming to think there is  
none I’m able to think about.

So I went to have a closer look at what Zotero does, and, as far as I  
can understand, it does _not_ implement disambiguation. Or at least it  
does not implement it correctly. So I actually wonder if you proposal  
would be trivial to be implemented in Zotero or not. Could you please  
elaborate a bit on this?

Why am I saying that Zotero seems to me not to be implementing  
disambiguation correctly? Because all it does is to make a guess,  
given a reference group and some style elements, whether 2 citations  
will need to be disambiguated or not. This guess is good most of the  
time, but it is very easy to create perfectly valid styles for which  
Zotero will miserably fail to disambiguate citations, because the way  
it is using to guess cannot provide it with enough information to  
decide in every situation.

Just to give you a few example, take this data set:  
[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/zoteroItems.rdf](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/zoteroItems.rdf)

You should be able to import it in Zotero.

Here you’ll find:

a) a book I (fictionally …😉 edited with a friend and a book I  
authored with my wife in 2007. I’m the first editor of the first and  
the first author of the second.

b) 2 books by two brothers: Giovanni and Giuseppe Pascuzzi, same year,  
different titles;

c) 2 books with the same author and 2 different editors, same year.

If we apply the following style to a):  
[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/testAddName.xml](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/testAddName.xml)

we will get:  
(Andrea Rossato et al., 2007), (Andrea Rossato et al., 2007)

you can install this style in Zotero from here:  
[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/install/testAddName.csl](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/install/testAddName.csl)

What happened? The style requires author and date. If no author is  
present the editor will be used instead. While these 2 citations  
produce the same output, and so add-name should be applied, Zotero  
thinks their output is different (as far as I understand because their  
author field is different).

Now, if you apply this style to b):  
[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/testAddGivenName.xml](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/testAddGivenName.xml)

install it from here:  
[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/install/testAddGivenName.csl](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/install/testAddGivenName.csl)

you’ll get:  
(G. Pascuzzi, 2004),(G. Pascuzzi, 2004)

I’m not sure what the issue is, here. But the result is definitely  
wrong: add-given-name should be used, and it is not. But, as I said,  
Zotero is not take into account what the style actually produces. It  
is just guessing.

And you can see that especially in this 3rd issue.

If you apply this style to c):  
[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/testYearSuffix.xml](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/testYearSuffix.xml)

install it from here:  
[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/install/testYearSuffix.csl](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/install/testYearSuffix.csl)

you’ll get:  
(Roberto Caso, no date),(Roberto Caso, no date)

Now, this style is not using the date for books. But the items have  
the date set. Since the items have the date set and the style has the  
option disambiguate-add-year-suffix Zotero is guessing every citation  
gets the date, and so to disambiguate it is sufficient to add the year  
suffix. In this case this is false.

But Zotero will think that the citation has been disambiguated, and it  
will not apply the disambiguate-condition.

You can test it by applying to c) the following style:  
[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/testYearSuffix-2.xml](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/testYearSuffix-2.xml)

install here:  
[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/install/testYearSuffix-2.csl](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/install/testYearSuffix-2.csl)

This will produce:  
(Roberto Caso, Giovanni Pascuzzi, no date),(Roberto Caso, Andrea Rossato, no date)

Since disambiguate-add-year-suffix is not set, Zotero will not  
consider the citations disambiguated, and it will try the disambiguate  
condition.

Now, you may think those are bugs that can be easily solved. Maybe you  
are right, but the information I have, and the fact that I discovered  
those issues by reading the code, makes me think this is a design  
flaw. I don’t see any easy solutions.

Which brings me to the reason why I wrote such a long message: when  
you decided to add those disambiguation options did you have in mind a  
way of implementing them? Would you please share it with me?

Thanks,  
Andrea

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<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [August 1, 2008, 1:34pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/4 "2008-08-01T13:34:54Z")

</div>

Good analysis Andrea 🙂

> Which brings me to the reason why I wrote such a long message: when  
> you decided to add those disambiguation options did you have in mind a  
> way of implementing them? Would you please share it with me?

I’m not sure how Zotero is implementing it, but it might be good to  
isolate what needs to be done, and what the specific problems are? In  
fact, maybe we ought to define a formal test based on your examples?

a) a book I (fictionally …😉 edited with a friend and a book I  
authored with my wife in 2007. I’m the first editor of the first and  
the first author of the second.

b) 2 books by two brothers: Giovanni and Giuseppe Pascuzzi, same year,  
different titles;

c) 2 books with the same author and 2 different editors, same year.

So what would we expect of these examples?

a)

add-suffix = True  
add-names = False, unless et al is set to not print second name  
add-title = True

b)

add-suffix = True  
add-givennames = True  
add-title = True

c)

I’m unclear on this one.

Is the above correct (except for c)? Can we write some tests for it?

Bruce

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Andrea\_Rossato1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e47774/32.png) [@Andrea\_Rossato1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Andrea_Rossato1)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2008, 1:48pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/5 "2008-08-01T13:48:15Z")

</div>

> Good analysis Andrea 🙂
> 
> > Which brings me to the reason why I wrote such a long message: when  
> > you decided to add those disambiguation options did you have in mind a  
> > way of implementing them? Would you please share it with me?
> 
> I’m not sure how Zotero is implementing it, but it might be good to  
> isolate what needs to be done, and what the specific problems are? In  
> fact, maybe we ought to define a formal test based on your examples?
> 
> a) a book I (fictionally …😉 edited with a friend and a book I  
> authored with my wife in 2007. I’m the first editor of the first and  
> the first author of the second.
> 
> b) 2 books by two brothers: Giovanni and Giuseppe Pascuzzi, same year,  
> different titles;
> 
> c) 2 books with the same author and 2 different editors, same year.
> 
> So what would we expect of these examples?
> 
> a)
> 
> add-suffix = True  
> add-names = False, unless et al is set to not print second name

and so this is True since the test style I proposed has:

> b)
> 
> add-suffix = True  
> add-givennames = True  
> add-title = True
> 
> c)
> 
> I’m unclear on this one.

according to the test I proposed here:  
[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/testYearSuffix.xml](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/testYearSuffix.xml)

this should get evaluated:

> Is the above correct (except for c)? Can we write some tests for it?

I don’t know if I don’t get something, but you can find all relevant  
tests here:

[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/)

Do you need/mean something different?

Andrea

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<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [August 1, 2008, 1:52pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/6 "2008-08-01T13:52:47Z")

</div>

I mean a unit test that will report failure (or success) when run.

See, for example:

[http://xbiblio.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xbiblio/citeproc-rb/test/test\_csl.rb?view=markup](http://xbiblio.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xbiblio/citeproc-rb/test/test_csl.rb?view=markup)

Bruce

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Andrea\_Rossato1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e47774/32.png) [@Andrea\_Rossato1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Andrea_Rossato1)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2008, 2:13pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/7 "2008-08-01T14:13:10Z")

</div>

so far only Zotero support those features, and I wouldn’t know how to  
test it (I just imported the rfd file, installed the styles I linked  
before, and opened a document with all the 6 citations).

we have the data though.

The first thest:

This is the expected output:

(Andrea Rossato & Paola Locatin, 2007)  
(Andrea Rossato & Roberto Caso, 2007)

instead we get:  
(Andrea Rossato et al., 2007)  
(Andrea Rossato et al., 2007)

Second, we should get  
(Giuseppe Pascuzzi, 2004)  
(Giovanni Pascuzzi, 2004)

instead we get:  
(G. Pascuzzi, 2004)  
(G. Pascuzzi, 2004)

The third we should get:  
(Roberto Caso, Giovanni Pascuzzi, no date)  
⁠(Roberto Caso, Andrea Rossato, no date)

instead we get:  
(Roberto Caso, no date)  
⁠Roberto Caso,no date)

Andrea

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<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [August 1, 2008, 3:50pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/8 "2008-08-01T15:50:37Z")

</div>

> > > Do you need/mean something different?
> > 
> > I mean a unit test that will report failure (or success) when run.
> 
> so far only Zotero support those features, and I wouldn’t know how to  
> test it (I just imported the rfd file, installed the styles I linked  
> before, and opened a document with all the 6 citations).

Right, but this is where test driven development makes some sense: you  
define the expectations formally up front, and then code until it  
passes. It allows us to, as you said earlier, be “careful” about these  
sorts of features (and documentation probably).

> we have the data though.

That’s helpful, and could be factored into the tests. Thanks.

Would love to hear from Simon on the bugs you’re reporting here 🙂

Bruce

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Andrea\_Rossato1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e47774/32.png) [@Andrea\_Rossato1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Andrea_Rossato1)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2008, 4:32pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/9 "2008-08-01T16:32:58Z")

</div>

> Right, but this is where test driven development makes some sense: you  
> define the expectations formally up front, and then code until it  
> passes. It allows us to, as you said earlier, be “careful” about these  
> sorts of features (and documentation probably).

Actually in Haskell test driven development is the rule (I spend a lot  
of my time preparing tests and data, but I didn’t write any proof of  
the properties of my functions… so far.😉

Just to emphasize my agreement.

> Would love to hear from Simon on the bugs you’re reporting here 🙂

As I said I don’t think we are actually talking of bugs, if with bugs  
we mean unintended errors.

I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot, now, and I think that there  
is only one way out, if you do not want to blindly evaluate every  
possible combination of a citation till you find the non colliding one  
(which could mean a lot of space, just think to a huge document with a  
huge number of colliding citations of collaborative works, with a  
strict et-al setup, not uncommon in many disciplines).

The way out is to encode into the formatted output disambiguating  
information to be used for post-processing. This, on my side, means  
increasing the complexity of the output and either write an  
abstraction layer for the end user output filter (pandoc), or increase  
the complexity of the rendering functions. Still I’m not sure this is  
going to work. But it’s probably worth a try.

I’d love to hear from the other developers how they think to deal with  
this issue. I’d love to ear if someone has an idea on a possible  
algorithm, basically.

Andrea

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Elena\_Razlogova](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Elena\_Razlogova](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Elena_Razlogova)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2008, 5:00pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/10 "2008-08-01T17:00:28Z")

</div>

While we’re waiting on Simon, I tested the items at [http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/zoteroItems.rdf](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/zoteroItems.rdf)  
with APA style on dev xpi and got this:

Caso, R. (2005a). Same Author Different Editors First (A. Rossato, Ed.).  
Caso, R. (2005b). Same Author Different Editors Second (G. Pascuzzi,  
Ed.).  
Pascuzzi, G. (2004). The Brother’s Book.  
Pascuzzi, G. (2004). First Book.  
Rossato, A., & Caso, R. (Eds.). (2007). Edited Book.  
Rossato, A., & Locatin, P. (2007). Authored Book.

(Caso, 2005a)  
(Caso, 2005b)  
(Giovanni Pascuzzi, 2004)  
(Giuseppe Pascuzzi, 2004)  
(Rossato & Caso, 2007)  
(Rossato & Locatin, 2007)

Which seems like expected behavior, since editors of authored works  
shouldn’t matter for disambiguation. No?

There is an open ticket on subsequent-author-substitute problem which  
may be related:  
[https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/933](https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/933)

But I think most of the problems with existing disambiguations have  
been solved.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Elena\_Razlogova](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Elena\_Razlogova](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Elena_Razlogova)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2008, 5:04pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/11 "2008-08-01T17:04:54Z")

</div>

> On the disambiguate-add-date option, could we just specify the name  
> for the macro? Then the particular style will be able to format the  
> date as necessary as long as the name is standard. I know we haven’t  
> done it before, but it was discussed at one point as possibility. For  
> this option, you wouldn’t have to compare the dates, just the names  
> for interviewee/interviewer and letter author/recipient.

Sorry you’d still compare the dates, but presumably it wouldn’t matter  
since it’s the dates in the implementer’s db that will be compared and  
not the macros. So I think specifying a standard names for key macros  
may work for this. E\>

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Andrea\_Rossato1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e47774/32.png) [@Andrea\_Rossato1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Andrea_Rossato1)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2008, 5:21pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/12 "2008-08-01T17:21:14Z")

</div>

sorry Elena, maybe I was not clear on this point, but you need to test  
the data with the test styles I provided here:

[http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/install/](http://gorgias.mine.nu/csl/install/)

I know that with APA (and probably with most or even all of the other  
styles) everything is fine.

The problem is that the disambiguation routine is designed to guess,  
and guess right for the greatest majority of the cases. Still it is  
not a general implementation, as my test cases point out.

Each style points out a single problem with the Zotero implementation.  
But you need those styles to actually see it.

I hope I clarified the point.

Best,  
Andrea

PS: I said that I may be wrong. All my styles are valid, according to  
jing.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [August 1, 2008, 5:27pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/13 "2008-08-01T17:27:13Z")

</div>

…

> The way out is to encode into the formatted output disambiguating  
> information to be used for post-processing.

In general, this is the approach I took in the XSLT code. So, I take  
the raw source data, process it into an intermediate representation  
that includes additional flags (like year suffix\*), and then use that  
for output processing. In an OO design, you’d just set those  
parameters on each object.

I guess the trick is still exactly how best to do that. The above  
worked really well for suffix generation, for example, but at least  
some of the other disambiguation options have different logics that  
depends in part on the output style (as you showed).

Bruce

- if you’re really curious, look through the parameters I use in files  
like [http://xbiblio.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xbiblio/citeproc-xsl/trunk/lib/main/format-style.xsl?view=markup](http://xbiblio.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xbiblio/citeproc-xsl/trunk/lib/main/format-style.xsl?view=markup)  
and [http://xbiblio.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xbiblio/citeproc-xsl/trunk/lib/citeproc.xsl?view=markup](http://xbiblio.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xbiblio/citeproc-xsl/trunk/lib/citeproc.xsl?view=markup).  
While this code is pretty dated, it does cover some of these issues.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Stephan\_Tolksdorf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ac8455/32.png) [@Stephan\_Tolksdorf](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Stephan_Tolksdorf)\
**Post date:** [August 3, 2008, 4:05pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/14 "2008-08-03T16:05:08Z")

</div>

Hi,

I just joined this list and was reading the interesting discussion on  
disambiguation options in the Sourceforge list archive.

Andrea wrote:

> I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot, now, and I think that there  
> is only one way out, if you do not want to blindly evaluate every  
> possible combination of a citation till you find the non colliding one  
> (which could mean a lot of space, just think to a huge document with a  
> huge number of colliding citations of collaborative works, with a  
> strict et-al setup, not uncommon in many disciplines).  
> (…)  
> I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot, now, and I think that there  
> is only one way out, if you do not want to blindly evaluate every  
> possible combination of a citation till you find the non colliding one  
> (which could mean a lot of space, just think to a huge document with a  
> huge number of colliding citations of collaborative works, with a  
> strict et-al setup, not uncommon in many disciplines).

It’s possible that I’m missing something important, but I don’t really  
see the difficulty. A simple algorithm would collect all the citations  
from the documents, format them according to the default style, check  
for duplicates in the generated text references and then try out the  
disambiguation options for each set of duplicates until all citations  
are unambiguous. Even in the worst case the set of citations that  
generate a given identical text reference probably isn’t larger than a  
few dozens, so I don’t think a simple iterative/recursive approach will  
be problematic with regard to space or time.

Best regards,  
Stephan

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Andrea\_Rossato1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e47774/32.png) [@Andrea\_Rossato1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Andrea_Rossato1)\
**Post date:** [August 3, 2008, 5:37pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/15 "2008-08-03T17:37:00Z")

</div>

Suppose a style with

and a few citations like:

1. A. Rossato, B. Caso, C. Sempronio, D. Tizio, E. Doe, F. Smith, G.  
Scarpa, Some Title, 2001.
2. A. Rossato, B. Caso, C. Sempronio, D. Tizio, E. Doe, F. Smith, H.  
Scarpa, Some Other Title, 2001.

All will be evaluated to:  
Rossato, et al., 2001.

When you look at the evaluated citations you cannot say why and when  
you’ll be able to find two non colliding versions, so you start adding  
a name, you evaluate and look at the output a both have:

Rossato, Caso, et al., 2001.

And so you add a second name, and so on. Then you switch to adding  
give names. How many times do yo have to evaluate the same citations  
for? You cannot know. And if you have a book with hundreds of  
citations, you cannot predict how many times a citation will be  
evaluated. I had some previous experience with the WIKINDX citation  
style. I wanted to use it in a wiki I was developing (UniWakka), in  
order to have a (more) easily extensible citation style support. But  
my laptop was not able to render a chapter of the book I was writing  
at that time in less than a few minutes. Sometime, performance and  
space usage can be critical. Moreover I would really like to prevent  
possible future bug reports.😉

Now I’m working on a version of the Haskell implementation that will  
disambiguate every citation in a maximum of two evaluations (maybe  
even just one, I still don’t know). That would be a great improvement.  
This way I could also gather some idea on how to implement the  
"collapse" option. Any idea on this?

Cheers,  
Andrea

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Stephan\_Tolksdorf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ac8455/32.png) [@Stephan\_Tolksdorf](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Stephan_Tolksdorf)\
**Post date:** [August 3, 2008, 8:00pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/16 "2008-08-03T20:00:16Z")

</div>

Andrea Rossato wrote:

> Suppose a style with
> 
> and a few citations like:
> 
> 1. A. Rossato, B. Caso, C. Sempronio, D. Tizio, E. Doe, F. Smith, G.  
> Scarpa, Some Title, 2001.
> 2. A. Rossato, B. Caso, C. Sempronio, D. Tizio, E. Doe, F. Smith, H.  
> Scarpa, Some Other Title, 2001.
> 
> All will be evaluated to:  
> Rossato, et al., 2001.
> 
> When you look at the evaluated citations you cannot say why and when  
> you’ll be able to find two non colliding versions, so you start adding  
> a name, you evaluate and look at the output a both have:
> 
> Rossato, Caso, et al., 2001.
> 
> And so you add a second name, and so on. Then you switch to adding  
> give names. How many times do yo have to evaluate the same citations  
> for? You cannot know.

The important thing is that the number of evaluations per citation is  
bounded by a low constant determined by the maximum number of authors  
and the number of disambiguation options.

> And if you have a book with hundreds of  
> citations, you cannot predict how many times a citation will be  
> evaluated.

A smart algorithm would memoize the final formatting of a given citation  
in a given formatting context (ibid options etc), so that it doesn’t  
matter performance-wise how often the same work is cited.

> I had some previous experience with the WIKINDX citation  
> style. I wanted to use it in a wiki I was developing (UniWakka), in  
> order to have a (more) easily extensible citation style support. But  
> my laptop was not able to render a chapter of the book I was writing  
> at that time in less than a few minutes. Sometime, performance and  
> space usage can be critical.

That implementation seems to be a bit inefficient…

> Now I’m working on a version of the Haskell implementation that will  
> disambiguate every citation in a maximum of two evaluations (maybe  
> even just one, I still don’t know). That would be a great improvement.

I’m not sure the improvement would be that great. Depending on how much  
you cache intermediate formatting results you would mainly save on some  
string concatenations, I’d guess.

> This way I could also gather some idea on how to implement the  
> “collapse” option. Any idea on this?

Whether or not multiple work citations are collapsed seems to be  
independent of disambiguation, tough the formatting depends on it.  
Hence, for disambiguation one should probably treat multiple work  
citations as multiple independent citations, then collapse if authors  
are identical using the longest name and the disambiguated years (which  
means one needs to keep track of applied disambiguations). Coding this  
up may be a bit hairy, though.

Stephan

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Andrea\_Rossato1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e47774/32.png) [@Andrea\_Rossato1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Andrea_Rossato1)\
**Post date:** [August 3, 2008, 9:55pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/17 "2008-08-03T21:55:54Z")

</div>

> The important thing is that the number of evaluations per citation is  
> bounded by a low constant determined by the maximum number of authors  
> and the number of disambiguation options.

yes, and that number is unknown. I don’t know if I understand your  
point, but the issue, for me, is given to the fact that you do not  
know how to manipulate the output of an evaluated citation.

That is to say, when you read:

Smith, et al., 2004

you don’t know that Smith is a name and that, if you want to  
disambiguate that citation, you need to insert another name from the  
author field of the reference data right after it.

Instead you must change the evaluation environment and re-evaluate the  
style with the reference data, and generate another output.

> A smart algorithm would memoize the final formatting of a given citation  
> in a given formatting context (ibid options etc), so that it doesn’t  
> matter performance-wise how often the same work is cited.

the contest is not important, and it’s easy to generate just by  
looking at the citations list. But this is more or less what I’m  
trying to do, which is made a bit complex by the recursive nature of  
the style evaluation.

> I’m not sure the improvement would be that great. Depending on how much  
> you cache intermediate formatting results you would mainly save on some  
> string concatenations, I’d guess.

Well, as I said, instead of regenerating the output you can transform  
it with simple post-processing functions. Using some generic  
programming techniques, querying and transforming portions of the  
output tree should be easy and far less resource intensive then  
regenerating it.

> Whether or not multiple work citations are collapsed seems to be  
> independent of disambiguation, tough the formatting depends on it.  
> Hence, for disambiguation one should probably treat multiple work  
> citations as multiple independent citations, then collapse if authors  
> are identical using the longest name and the disambiguated years (which  
> means one needs to keep track of applied disambiguations). Coding this  
> up may be a bit hairy, though.

The problem is that you don’t know what a given string is. If we were  
talking of structured data everything would be easy. Instead we are  
talking of the output of macros, conditionals, etc.: strings. Am I  
missing something?

Andrea

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Elena\_Razlogova](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Elena\_Razlogova](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Elena_Razlogova)\
**Post date:** [August 3, 2008, 10:29pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/18 "2008-08-03T22:29:22Z")

</div>

I don’t think you’re comparing the output, I think you’re comparing  
the original data. Then there is less ambiguity, right? I agree that  
maximum number of authors can’t be determined, but couldn’t you just  
run a loop to find out how many there are?

You can look here to see how Simon does it in Zotero:  
[https://www.zotero.org/trac/browser/extension/branches/1.0/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/cite.js](https://www.zotero.org/trac/browser/extension/branches/1.0/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/cite.js)

It’s true that your example styles don’t work in Zotero, but I suspect  
they could be fixed to work–I just don’t have time to play with them  
right now–maybe during the week.

E

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [August 4, 2008, 12:27am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/19 "2008-08-04T00:27:12Z")

</div>

> I don’t think you’re comparing the output, I think you’re comparing  
> the original data.

Not exactly. In examples using et al, the ambiguity is in fact  
introduced by the et al rules. So you have to know what those rules  
say to drop so that you can know what to add back. Blah …

> Then there is less ambiguity, right? I agree that  
> maximum number of authors can’t be determined, but couldn’t you just  
> run a loop to find out how many there are?
> 
> You can look here to see how Simon does it in Zotero:  
> [https://www.zotero.org/trac/browser/extension/branches/1.0/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/cite.js](https://www.zotero.org/trac/browser/extension/branches/1.0/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/cite.js)

I think Andreas’ point is that Simon’s code on this is less-than-robust.

Bruce

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Stephan\_Tolksdorf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ac8455/32.png) [@Stephan\_Tolksdorf](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Stephan_Tolksdorf)\
**Post date:** [August 4, 2008, 8:02am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/disambiguate-add-date-option/496/20 "2008-08-04T08:02:52Z")

</div>

Andrea Rossato wrote:

> > The important thing is that the number of evaluations per citation is  
> > bounded by a low constant determined by the maximum number of authors  
> > and the number of disambiguation options.
> 
> yes, and that number is unknown. I don’t know if I understand your  
> point, but the issue, for me, is given to the fact that you do not  
> know how to manipulate the output of an evaluated citation.

My point was that the number is low and only grows with the number of  
authors of a work, which always is a low number. So I don’t see a reason  
to worry about performance here.

> That is to say, when you read:
> 
> Smith, et al., 2004
> 
> you don’t know that Smith is a name and that, if you want to  
> disambiguate that citation, you need to insert another name from the  
> author field of the reference data right after it.

Right, but you certainly know the number of authors in the referenced  
work and you can keep record of how many names previously were printed  
before “et al”. So you just try until the references are disambiguated  
or there are no more unprinted names.

> > I’m not sure the improvement would be that great. Depending on how much  
> > you cache intermediate formatting results you would mainly save on some  
> > string concatenations, I’d guess.
> 
> Well, as I said, instead of regenerating the output you can transform  
> it with simple post-processing functions. Using some generic  
> programming techniques, querying and transforming portions of the  
> output tree should be easy and far less resource intensive then  
> regenerating it.

My feeling is that in the end your querying and transformation will  
almost do the same as the straightforward algorithm, except for pasting  
together the output, but maybe I’m overlooking something.

> > Whether or not multiple work citations are collapsed seems to be  
> > independent of disambiguation, tough the formatting depends on it.  
> > Hence, for disambiguation one should probably treat multiple work  
> > citations as multiple independent citations, then collapse if authors  
> > are identical using the longest name and the disambiguated years (which  
> > means one needs to keep track of applied disambiguations). Coding this  
> > up may be a bit hairy, though.
> 
> The problem is that you don’t know what a given string is. If we were  
> talking of structured data everything would be easy. Instead we are  
> talking of the output of macros, conditionals, etc.: strings. Am I  
> missing something?

But you know whether the content of a certain variable has become part  
of the output, at least if you keep record. Author-year collapsing can  
only be reasonably done if for each cited work in a multiple work  
citation the same variables are printed and the printed variables, with  
the exception of the year, are identical. Additionally, one should  
require that the individual citations would generate the same output if  
the years were identical. Under these circumstances one can collapse the  
citations by printing any one of the citations and substituting the year  
for a comma-separated list of years.

BTW: I can imagine that coding up the complicated formatting logic in a  
purely functional way (i.e. Haskell-style) could be a major pain.

Stephan

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