Edited Book with chapters by different authors

Niya.B

Hello,

I need to add a PDF of an edited book in Zotero, which has several chapters written by different authors. I know that I can add a PDF as a Book Section but this means that I would need to add the same PDF (whole book) 13 times in order to reference the 13different chapters and authors.
Is there a way to import the PDF once and somehow add chapter titles and authors?

Many thanks

adamsmith

You don't need a PDF to create an item, so you certainly don't need to import the same PDF 13 times.
You can add the whole edited book with the PDF attached and then add the 13 chapters individually: if they have DOIs, using those, otherwise, by right-clicking on the book and selecting "Create Book Section" and then manually adding chapter title, authors and page range for each chapter.

Niya.B

That's great, thank you. All added now. Can I ask if there is a way to organise all the book sections as sub-items under one parent item. It's a bit confusing to see all of them floating in my library.
I know this was not possible in the past and wondering if a new feature has been developed.
I guess I could create a sub-collection that represent the book and contains all chapter items... although still my library will be cluttered....

thurstonet

Somewhat related topic - I have a few Springer health books where individual chapters have DOI's, as subsets of the parent DOI:

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-04248-5_13
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-04248-5_15

I don't know if this is just a quick of Springer or if other publishers do something similar.

I was wondering if there is a possibility of providing an elegant way to select chapters to enter into Zotero when entering the DOI for the whole book, perhaps using a pop-up selection box?

Niya.B

My book chapter didn't have sub DOIS. One book was on JSTOR and I was able to check all chapters and export a group citation as a ris file. When imported on Zotero, it gave me individual book sections with correct pages. However, the chapters with long titles were entered incomplete. For another book I added everything manualy.

I've put them all in a sub-collection. The issue there is that they don't come in Chapter order but alphabetical order, which looks very confusing.
It would be great to have a field in Book Section that the chapter can be entered. Or even better a Book item that can contain chapter titles.

adamsmith

Can I ask if there is a way to organise all the book sections as sub-items under one parent item. It's a bit confusing to see all of them floating in my library.
I know this was not possible in the past and wondering if a new feature has been developed.

There's nothing new there, no. Note that the "Create Book Section" option will create a related item connection to the parent book (see the "Related" tab on the right)

I was wondering if there is a possibility of providing an elegant way to select chapters to enter into Zotero when entering the DOI for the whole book, perhaps using a pop-up selection box

I'm afraid even at a technical level that's a no when using the identifier-- the chapter information isn't in the data for the book DOI: https://api.crossref.org/v1/works/10.1007/978-3-031-04248-5

That said, we used to have the option of adding all chapters for Springer (and a few other publishers') books when saving from the book's landing page, i.e. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-04248-5 in this case. That appears to be broken, currently (Zotero doesn't recognize that as a Springer book at all), but I'd guess it's not actually hard to fix, so we can look at that.

thurstonet

Adding all chapters when saving from the book's landing page would certainly be a step forwards, and if this could be re-implemented that would be fab.

I'm finding myself accessing works published by Springer quite frequently at present.

Is there a way of finding related volumes or a series link through DOI or ISBN that could be implemented? Again, Springer is the main culprit for not making it obvious which volume in a series the book is (In this case, Volume 5 I gather).