Sorting legal citations differently from other types of citations

edited March 21, 2023
I have this issue where Zotero (in APA in this case), sorts legal citations by author first, just as it does with other citations.
The problem is that the legal citations has no author BUT the author field is still filled out with the name of the department from which the law originates. This is not used or needed to make the citations at all.
So in other words, the author field is filled out, but must be ignored/suppresed for legal citations, when sorting the bibliography.

Here are the relevant links to our own modified APA (but the official APA 7 in Zotero, also sort legal citations by title), and the link to the translator for the site where we get the legal citations from.

https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/ucl-university-college-apa.csl

https://github.com/zotero/translators/blob/5dcd1bc6fac814b7d9ad00a646ee8a9fc564fcd7/Retsinformation.js


Is there anything I can change in the APA code to change this to the desired behaviour?
Alternatively can I suggest to change the translator to not scrape the author of the laws in on the website "retsinformation"?

Thank you in advance, this is really bugging me.
  • The field is visible in the bibliography, though, isn't it? The sorting and display of the first field in the bibliography should be identical. (in text behavior is different)

    @bmwiernik -- is there any reason APA currently has legal types treated different in text but not in the bibliography?
  • You should not enter that information in the author field of the item.

    See the items in this library for examples of how to enter legal items from the APA manual so that they are formatted correctly. https://www.zotero.org/groups/2205533/test_items_library/collections/MR2N872S/item-list
  • Right -- but is there any reason not to make the style more robust to different data entry? I looked, and none of the legal item types in the test library *have* creator names, so it'd be easy enough to exclude them from the style and keep them in the metadata.
  • @adamsmith If you is the author field visible in the bibliography, then the answer is no. Not in our own version of APA which I linked and not in the official APA 7 version.

    The title (long or short+long) are shown, the author (ministry in this case) is not present anywhere, which only adds to the confusion that it sorts based on an author that is not shown anywhere, not that it should be shown anyways.

    So why is that information in the author field? Simply because of the Translator for the specific site that we use for all legal citations in Denmark.
    So maybe the solution is changing the Translator?
  • I will get this made more robust in the CSL style
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