Does Zotero do literary works?

ransomca

Hi,
How would one enter a work such as a short story, poem or play/screenplay into Zotero?
Thanks,
Callista

erazlogo

if they are published in a book, use "book section" (or "book" if a play is published as a book); if they are not published use "manuscript."

Nicolae

I can't store a book like a book section, because it will became between commas in a bibliography. I want a chapter to be between commas, but not a book that is part of a complete works. I have no solution for that:

Author, Title book, in SameAuthor, Complete Works 8, etc. etc.

If I use book section for Title book, I'll have "Title book" in a bibliography.
The solution shoud difference between "book in book" and "section book", because I want to have commas in chapters.

Mihai

mtrahan

Sorry to bump this thread, but I'm also having trouble to manage complete works of certain authors with Zotero. I don't have much to suggest, but would love to hear if something is being done to help with this, or if there is something I (and the previous poster) am missing.

I guess it's not easy to do, but it would be awesome to have possibility to hierarchically manage references and "sub-references" to cite complete works. For example, I would like to have three different references for 1) a certain book included in complete works 2) the volume of the complete works in which is the book 3) the complete works, and then I could link them correctly so that Zotero knows the hierarchy between those 3 elements. But hrm, I guess there is most probably a better way to deal with this...

Anyone else having trouble to manage complete works in Zotero? Any tips?

Thanks in advance.

adamsmith

Hierarchical items are generally on the map of developers, but will take more time.
I'd use "series" for complete works so far - that seems about right, no?

mtrahan

Thanks for the information abour hierarchical items being in development.

About using "series" for complete works, I don't know. I'm using Zotero in french (dealing with only french references, and also my first language is french, so I apologize if this is just a language problem...), and I thought that the "series" field was for what we call in french a "collection" (like a book serie, sub-category of a publisher's catalogue... I don't know how to explain). For example, the complete works I'm working with are published by Gallimard, in a "collection" called "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade". If I put, say, as book-title, "Works I", and as serie "Complete works", I don't know where I'm supposed to put the "collection", in my case "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade"?

Or you meant writing individual work title under book-title, then "Works I" under series? In any way I seem to be short of one field to manage the information I want.

But I'm quite new to Zotero (and references managing software in general) so it's quite possible that I don't totally understand yet how to manage correctly my library... Thank you very much for your help, I appreciate it.

ajlyon

This can be tough. My current solution is to use the collected works title and volume as the series name and number, as adamsmith recommended.

For the short story "Taras Bul'ba", part of the book Mirgorod, published in the collected works of Gogol' entitled Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, in volume 2 of the collected works, I get:

N. V. Gogol', “Taras Bul'ba,” in Mirgorod, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh 2 (Moskva: Izd-vo Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966), 34-164.

I would prefer to get:

N. V. Gogol', “Taras Bul'ba,” in Mirgorod in Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh vol. 2 (Moskva: Izd-vo Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966), 34-164.

Series doesn't provide correct handling, since it is not treated as a title by the styles, so it doesn't get italics. Also, the editor of a collected works would then be entered as Series Editor, which is usually not included by styles, while it probably should be included for the editor of a collected work, since it's approximately equivalent to the editor of a book.

adamsmith

yes, that's exactly what I was thinking, I see the limitations of the current Zotero exactly as described by ajlyon

mtrahan

I will use this solution for now and input the rest of the information manually when I cite. Thanks for your help.

simifilm

Hierarchical items are generally on the map of developers, but will take more time.

Is there any timeframe for this? People have been asking for this basically since the first release of Zotero and I don't see any progress being made. The related bugs all targeted towards 1.x releases but haven't been touched in months or even years …

adamsmith

I'm not a developer, but I don't see a realistically predictable timeframe.
2.0 is feature frozen until the final release - that should happen relatively soon.
2.1 will include the implementation of csl 1.0 which will bring major advances in what is possible citation-wise (especially, but not only, for international, legal, and literary scholars), but that will take considerable effort.
Then there are a whole bunch of other outstanding requests that have also been long requested, perhaps most urgently of all duplicate detection.
So from my informed-observer point of view I'd say your time frame is - patience. This is not to say that I wouldn't like to see the feature sooner rather than later, but anything else seems unrealistic.

ajlyon

I hate to continue the digression, but don't forget that Zotero's development team has not been growing to match its user base, so development of major new features will be slow. More paid developers are not going to come out of thin air; if you want Zotero to get better (and we all do, of course), then push for tangible support. Try to get your institution to donate money (in lieu of buying Endnote, perhaps) or developer time. If you can, work on documentation and user support on the Zotero website, so that core developers can focus on moving down the roadmap.