Disambiguation Date Added to References

[tom-mclean]

I'm struggling to work out why, when I compile my dissertation using Pandoc, a date is being added to the short form note citation for some of the items in my bibliography.

• Each chapter is in a separate Markdown file
• Pandoc compiles the whole to PDF
• I'm using Citeproc to manage the citations with the CSL style guide file for Chicago full note referencing that comes with Zotero, a JSON bibliography file exported from Zotero

There is one item that a disambiguation date is being added incorrectly when it appears in a footnote, as though Citeproc/Pandoc thinks there are multiple items of the same author and title from different years. There is however only this one item by that title in my bibliography file. There are other works by the same author, but the titles and other details are different.

Why might this be happening, and how do I stop it? (For this purpose, removing all disambiguation dates from footnotes is an acceptable solution, but I can't work out how to edit the CSL file to do that, or how to make it happen some other way).

Thanks!

Edited to Add: I've just tried cutting sections out of chapters to find out when the problem is triggered, and I'm left more confused. If I just have my first chapter, and the first five paragraphs of the second chapter, the problem persists. If I remove the reference from the last of those five paragraphs from the second chapter, the problem goes away. However that reference is to a work cited several times in the first chapter and in those five paragraphs of the second chapter. (And if I remove only that reference and have the rest of chapters one and two, the problem is there).

[badumont]

Could you provide a bibliography file containing only the items that trigger disambiguation and a minimal test case?

[tom-mclean]

Thank you.

It's not absolutely minimal, but shrunk down most of the way.

The PDF shows what I'm seeing, and there's the JSON Bibliography and a Markdown file, both in fairly reduced form.

chapters.md
library.json
output.pdf

(I don't appear to be able to upload the YAML file or the CSL file here, but can also share those if they might contain the problem).

And in case it's because I'm calling something weird with Pandoc, at the command line, I'm entering the following:

pandoc -s --citeproc default_thesis.yaml chapters.md -o output.pdf --bibliography library.json --pdf-engine=lualatex

[badumont]

Do you use the file chicago-fullnote-bibliography.csl provided by Zotero? If so, it looks like a bug in Pandoc indeed. You can work around this by using a copy of the CSL file with l. 1395 removed (which reads <text macro="date-disambiguate"/>).

[tom-mclean]

Thanks – that seems to be working, at least as a workaround.