Institutional names

CSL Development
1

Chris Maloney has a thread on the citeproc-js tracker concerning names handling:

https://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js/issue/173/fix-institutional-authors-jiggery-pokery

As the title says, the issue is a request to turn off (some of) the
institutional handling in citeproc-js by default. I suspect this will
be a welcome thing for everyone generally, but it would change default
output, so I’d like to run it past the list before I release anything.

The behaviour is currently triggered by names set as a "literal"
element in a CSL JSON name object. It has two effects.

First, the processor recognizes such names as institutions, which
enables a couple of special operations on them in the CSL-m schema.
Specifically, if the string contains multiple elements separated by
pipe characters, the elements to be rendered can be controlled by
attributes in the CSL-m; and both individual elements and the entire
name string as a whole can be abbreviated through the Abbreviation
Filter. These features are unintrusive WRT official CSL, and important
for legal materials (at least). I’d like to retain them, and they do
not seem to be an issue.

Second, the processor treats personal names that precede an
institution name as affiliated with the institution. This yields (for
example) “Smith & Jones, IBM” rather than "Smith, Jones & IBM."
Authors at the end of the list are treated as unaffiliated authors,
and are moved to the front in the rendered citation.

It is this second aspect of institutional names handling that Chris
strongly suggests should be turned off. To be honest, just writing the
description in the paragraph immediately above kind of made be cringe,
and I do suspect there will be a chorus of agreement. But as I say, I
want to be sure.

For reference, the original description of the name-rearrangement
logic, in input examples etc., is here:

http://citationstylist.org/docs/citeproc-js-csl.html#cs-institution-extension

Bedtime here now, and an early morning at work tomorrow; but I’ll look
forward to picking up responses later in the day if anyone has views
on this.

Frank

2

I’d like to see better institutional name support in future CSL
releases, but I agree it makes sense to turn off the feature by
default for vanilla citeproc-js processing.

Rintze

3

As per the earlier note, I have followed the suggestion of Chris
Maloney (and probably the quiet hope of many others), and disabled
name reordering by default in citeproc-js. The change takes effect
from tag 1.0.559.

https://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js/issue/173/fix-institutional-authors-jiggery-pokery

There is another small change in names handling in this release: I
noticed that decorations (italics etc) were being applied across name
lists, including separating punctuation. I have adjusted things so
that decorations are applied instead to individual names in the list,
which is surely more correct.

If anyone needs the old name-reordering behavior, it can be enabled by
setting the following option on an instantiated citation processor:

citeproc.sys.opt.development_extensions.spoof_institutional_affiliations

= true;

For posterity, name reordering is documented here:

http://citationstylist.org/docs/citeproc-js-csl.html#cs-institution-extension

Frank