MLA 8 title appearing for no reason

[kjmatthews]

Citing in MLA 8, I have an in-text citation that looks like this:

Code: Select all

-Perkowska, 2008, #70717@33

There is no other text by Perkowska in my bibliography. Given this, and the fact that I am suppressing the authors name with the - modifier, only the page numbers should appear: (33). For some reason, the title is also appearing in my in-text citation: (The Title, 33). This seems to be consistent, and limited to references with short titles. Adding the & modifier, which I think is supposed to suppress author and title, actually causes author and title to both appear. Can anyone help?

[Jon]

I'm guessing that this is because MLA uses the short title to disambiguate (after author and author plus initials) to distinguish between two reference that otherwise would have the same citation.

Jon
Sonny Software

[kjmatthews]

Thanks, Jon. That's not what's happening here. The same issue doesn't present with references that don't have short titles. There is no reason that the book title should ever appear unless there were more than one work by the same author, which there isn't!

[Jon]

I think it requires short titles because that's what Bookends uses for disambiguation, not full titles. Remove the short title and I believe the problem will go away.

You should contact tech support with the files I need to reproduce this if you want to follow it up (support@sonnysoftware.com).

Jon
Sonny Software

[kjmatthews]

Remove the short title and I believe the problem will go away.

I was wrong about this short title aspect of this; I went to delete the short title and realized that there was not one.

In the attached screenshot all three citations refer to exactly the same reference (the first contains the % modifier, and the other two the - modifier). The first and second are correct; the third is not. The second is, in fact, almost identical to the third, but is rendered differently. There is no other author in this document or in my reference library with a last name anything like "Perkowska."

I've been trying to isolate the problem, and can report two things:

1. The second citation is almost identical to the first, but contains the same reference twice, separated by semi-colons, to refer to different page ranges, like this: "-Perkowska, 2008, #70717@32; -Perkowska, 2008, #70717@33-36". Removing the semicolon and everything after it causes the third citation to appear correctly.
2. Deleting everything before, or deleting everything after this paragraph causes the third citation to render correctly.