Need to Include report number in citations and report number + no of pages in bibliography

I have been using Zotero while writing an evaluation of confidential reports of environmental studies. I have been using the British ecological society journals style (which is very similar to lots of others) but even though I have "report" as the document type and Report Number fields filled in, neither the citation (Bloggs et al 2009) nor the bibliography will include the report number. I would like the citation to read (Bloggs et al 2009, Report 123456) and the reference to read "Bloggs, A.B, Fred, E.G (etc).2009". Title of report...... "Report" 123456 nnn "pp", the nnn being number of pages. I have explored the available styles and while the following put report numbers into the bibliography, they space the lines in the bibliography way too far apart and do not insert the report into the citation. They also put "p." before the number of pages, implying that the number is a page number, not a number of pages. The relevant styles are:American Psychological Association, American Psychologist, Ecology Letters and Educational Researcher. I've looked at forum posts and tried to understand the CSL formats etc but it is beyond me to modify either the Brit Ecol Soc style or the ones that do recognise report numbers. I would greatly appreciate some assistance in this area.


Thanks,


Peter
  • well - the spacing of the bibliography really shouldn't be an obstacle:
    You can just adjust that when you're done. Yes, it can be changed in Zotero, but there's a time/utility trade-off here.

    Including the report number in the citation - that's very unusual for author date styles - you could just use the suffix field in the plugin, though, couldn't you?

    Report doesn't actually have a number of pages field - it's a pages field, which is supposed to be a page range, which is why you're getting pp. 123 in styles like APA.
    I don't know why that's the case, doesn't seem to make sense, I'll try to find out.

    So short version - this seems faster if you do it by hand, as we're stretched a bit thin on style development atm.
  • Thanks for your prompt and helpful response.
    Er, forgive my ignorance, "suffix field"? I do not know where that is. Can I get that field to point to "Report Number"? How?

    Kind regards,

    Peter
  • the suffix field in the word processor plugin and no, that can't point anywhere.
  • I had to do this in my style too, but it was a footnote format style. I'm not a programmer either but in the end I managed a simple CSL edit to fix the problem. You might need to fiddle with this a bit to get it working, but what you need to do is:
    1. go to http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits and follow the instructions to get the code for your style on the Zotero Reference Test Pane.

    2. you need to scroll to near the end where the <citation> part is. There, you need to make the citation distinguish between book and report. Then, before the </date> part, you need to insert:
    <text variable="genre" prefix=", " />
    <text variable="number" prefix=" " />

    (Genre points to the field relating to 'report type', so it should have 'Report' in this field for this work. This works for me as there are various types of reports such as research reports, consultation papers etc that I use. But if all you want is report, you could try <text variable="number" prefix="Report " />. 'Number' refers to the Report number field.

    Hope that helps!


    This works for me - there might need to be some fiddling around to make it perfect for you as I haven't actually tested this. You'll
  • Hey thanks heaps joycekwc! It works perfectly. I am much obliged.

    Kind regards,

    Peter
  • No worries. Glad to help!
  • I solved the pages problem in one of my styles using:

    <text variable="page" suffix=" pp"/>

    This is a hack though as it will be incorrect for reports with one page (unusual, but it could happen). I think that the mapping for report type entries should be from Pages (in Zotero) to number-of-pages in csl unless there are reports with page ranges. Then zotero should properly determine if pages is multiple or single when adding a label. Ideally there would be tests for all these different types so that you could determine what sort of pages variable you are dealing with and work accordingly.
  • I think that the mapping for report type entries should be from Pages (in Zotero) to number-of-pages in csl
    This is on the roadmap: https://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/issues/38
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