Newbie - changing format to Author (Year)

All is working well with Paperpile, however I cannot figure out how to change the citation to “Author (year)” for start of sentences. Thanks!!

Update: I see this has been asked before. Where are we now with this?

Click the blue bubble to expand the citation options. Check the suppress author box to show just the year in parentheses.
supress%20author

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Yes, thank you. I got this part, but then I have to manually type in the author(s) and it just leaves the hyperlink for the year. But better that than nothing. You should be able to choose which format:
Author (year) as opposed to (Author, year). This is pretty standard writing format. Many citations are at the beginning of a sentence or a statement.
Eg. The theory as expressed by Jones (2018) was an error.
Or: Jones (2018) posited that the theory was the foundation of the argument.

The existing option makes sense as it allows you to freely choose how you formulate the author part. This is not specified for all citation styles and sometimes you want to say something like “Jones and colleagues (2019)”

That said, we totally get your point and there is also another thread about this in the forum. It’s a planned feature.

Yes, I made one of the posts regarding this issue (can’t find my login). If you add a button to generate the three forms below it would save a lot of time for the social scientists using your software. No need that it reflects all the citation styles. Thanks!

Müller (2003)
Müller and Fischer (2003)
Müller et al. (2003)

Which citation styles do you typically use as Social scientist?

Hi Stefan,

I think one of the most popular (in Sociology/Political Science) is Chicago Manual Style (or APA Style).

But it would be great to have the top associations (normally corresponds to the top journals):

American Political Science Association: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/american-political-science-association.csl

American Sociological Assocation: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/american-sociological-association.csl

I think if you add Author(s) (Year) format it would really be a game changer. I normally work in Rmarkdown (simply use paperpile to organize references) but that would make me consider writing scientific articles in google docs.

Best,

Paul

Thanks so much @Paul, that’s really helpful.

Hi @stefan, I would like to ask if there is any update on the Author-Year citation style.

This citation method—Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (author-date)—is kind of common among economics literature. It would be great if you could incorporate this citation style in Paperpile.

Thanks in advance!

This “Author (year)” formatting is pretty vital, and I’ve seen it requested for quite a while. Often we need to refer to authors directly. Any chance of an update on this?

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Thanks for adding your voices here, @Jeff and @Martin_Scott. Still no update on this front, I’m afraid - we understand the importance for diverse cases/workflows and keep track of user demand, but have so far decided to prioritize other topics (see our roadmap). Following some big upcoming releases we will be able to consider other popularly demanded matters like this one. I’ve added your +1s to our tracker in the meantime.

@vicente @stefan I am a big fan of Paperpile but have stopped counting how many times I have had to copy/paste because the “author (year) feature” is lacking. Currently, I use Paperpile but direct my students to Zotero because the feature is not implemented yet (also because the latter is free).

Maybe you have a biased picture of how important this feature is because your userbase does not contain enough people from the social sciences and humanities? Following feature requests of an existing user base can be problematic insofar this user base is not representative of potential future users. In the meantime, people in the social sciences/humanities get locked in with other software such as Zotero.

I’m aware that this is something many users are waiting for. The distribution of our users across different fields is not something that we take into consideration here.

This feature is among the most frequently requested, so it’s definitely planned. Actually the UI is already implemented in the Word plugin and we have a good idea how this will work.

It’s just a matter of resources and unfortunately we had to focus on other things. Actually, we will announce some major news here on the forum soon. We we will address literally dozens of equally popular feature requests with some major updates this year. Once that’s on the way we hope to get to all the other frequently requested features soon.

Also, I’ve talked to my colleagues and to our knowledge only EndNote supports this out of the box and also Zotero uses the “suppress author” system.

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@stefan Thank you for your reply. Yes, I understand that. I think most platforms follow feature requests from their forum users - an even more selective crowd. It would be great if it could be supported at some point!

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I’m a psychologist and I’d like to second that having a button to change to author (year) (using Luap’s example: Müller et al. (2003)) would be very helpful.

Piling on to this thread. Definitely a feature that would be very helpful

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For me, that only would be a reason to keep paying for EndNote :frowning:
In addition to ctrl+i fro italics…