how do you disambiguate that?

CSL Development
8

Andrea,

This is a beautiful set of test data. It’s helping to clarify things
that have been quietly lurking about without clear solutions.

citeproc-js, and citeproc-hs do the following:

Smith, Brown & J. Jones (1980); Smith, Brown & J. Jones (1980)
Smith, Brown & J. Jones (1980); Smith, Benson, et al. (1980)
Smith, Brown & J. Jones (1980); Smith, Brown & A. Jones (1980)

is that correct? I have the feeling that the first one should be:

…

Adding disambiguate-add-year-suffix=“true” would produce the
collapsing of ITEM-1 and ITEM-2. ITEM-3 would be the same.

I get the same here. Yay.

I must confess I’m still a bit confused about the relations among the
various disambiguation options… so, to recapitulate, with the
initial example and:

  • disambiguate-add-names=“true” we get:

    Smith, Brown & Jones (1980); Smith, Brown & Jones (1980)
    Smith, Brown & Jones (1980); Smith, Benson, et al. (1980)
    Smith, Brown & Jones (1980); Smith, Brown & Jones (1980)

    Is it correct or the second one should be “Smith, Brown, et al.
    (1980); Smith, Benson, et al. (1980)”?

It’s correct. The pairing of cites in the output isn’t relevant,
although it’s a very helpful pattern for readability. ITEM-1 should
render in the same form everywhere in the document. It’s the first
item in each pair, so Smith, Brown & Jones (1980) is exactly right for
it, in the second line as well.

  • disambiguate-add-names=“true”, disambiguate-add-givenname=“true”
    and givenname-disambiguation-rule=“all-names”:

    Smith, Brown & J. Jones (1980); Smith, Brown & J. Jones (1980)
    Smith, Brown & J. Jones (1980); Smith, Benson, et al. (1980)
    Smith, Brown & J. Jones (1980); Smith, Brown & A. Jones (1980)

    This is correct, as you explained before.

Yep, that looks right. ITEM-1 and ITEM-2 are not fully
disambiguating, but we just provide all the information we can.

  • disambiguate-add-names=“true”, disambiguate-add-givenname=“true”,
    givenname-disambiguation-rule=“all-names”, and
    disambiguate-add-year-suffix=“true”

    Smith et al. (1980a); Smith et al. (1980b)
    Smith et al. (1980a); Smith, Benson, et al. (1980)
    Smith et al. (1980a); Smith, Brown & A. Jones (1980)

And this? Should the last one be “Smith, Brown & Jones”?

This one gets interesting. Technically, the cites disambiguate fine
here, and as you say, the initial “A.” looks superfluous. But I
wonder …

If you think about a reader digging through the bibliography looking
for these entries, and if you assume that the bibliography list is
sorted alphabetically by author, their task will be made much easier
if the max names are retained for the items disambiguated with
year-suffix (ITEM-1 and ITEM-2) – the extra information isn’t
relevant to disambiguation, but it can be relevant to the search for
the entries in a linear listing, because it helps the reader figure
out where to start looking – “Smith et al.” could be “Smith, Anderson
and Zappa”, or “Smith, Zappa and Anderson”, if there are 50 works by
Smith as the primary author, you’d kind of want to know which end of
the list to start from.

I’m not sure what the style guides say, so I guess that checking them
out would be the next step. But at the threshold, does anyone have
views on this one?

Frank