problems with date and "place" fields for periodicals

danilo

Hi,

I have three doubts/suggestions on Zotero on Periodicals:

1 - Some periodicals are dated for periods (for instance: aug./oct.2009). When I try to do that on zotero, it shows only the first month and the year, or in some cases just the year. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Is that something that I can customize on CSL?

2 - Some periodicals have both "volume" and "number" fields. In these cases, "volume" stands for an intermediate numbering (i.e. the group of periodicals for a year, or for a semester), and "number" stands for the specific issue. Is there a way to do it on Zotero? I couldn't find one.

3 - Brazilian bibliographical standards - and I believe others also do - require "place" for bibliographies of periodicals.
Like this:
ELLIS, Myriam. Documentos sobre a primeira biblioteca pública oficial de São Paulo. Revista de História, São Paulo, n.30, p.387-447, 1957.
However, none of the items dealing with periodicals have a "place" field to fill. Is there a way to do it already?
Can it be added?

fbennett

The short answers look to be: (1) you'll have to wait for date ranges until the new CSL processor becomes available, sometime next year; (2) issue numbers should work, and if they don't, it should just require a minor change to the relevant CSL style file; and (3) it looks like the field for place of publication should be opened up, in Zotero, for Journal, Magazine and Newspaper articles.

(I thought this had been opened up for newspapers, but apparently not yet).

A long-winded explanation of what has been done in the new CSL processor to cover some of these cases follows.

1. Date ranges. These are not supported in the current CSL processor. That will change.

The processor will ship with a sample date parsing function, similar to that used by Zotero to parse human-readable dates into their logical parts. The current samples file used to test the parser gives an idea of its capabilities. It recognizes both ranges and "fuzzy" dates.

For output, ranges are also supported. The processor test files illustrate some of the possibilities for formatting ranges. Output is automatically "collapsed" in the various date forms to produce output normally expected in citations. Supported combinations include:

• Day ranges with dates in text form
  
• Month ranges with dates in text form
  
• Year ranges with dates in text form
  
• Month ranges with year+month dates (your example case)
  
• Open ranges
  

The examples above are of text form dates, but numeric dates and date ranges are also supported. Dates in CSL 1.0 (the version of the language supported by the processor) are localized, so styles that take advantage of its date localization features will automatically produce correctly formatted dates when the language of the style is switched.

2. Issue numbers of periodicals. I can't speak for individual styles, but Zotero already stores the information needed for this, in the "Issue" field of the Journal Article type. Styles might need tweaking if they don't make use of it, but the field is there.

3. This sounds like Zotero may need to open up the publication-place CSL variable (or rather its Zotero equivalent) for these item types. Both the old and the new CSL processors are of course capable of including this in a citation, if the data is made available by Zotero. There is a possibly tricky issue with the language of place names in citations that cross language boundaries, but printing the data by itself is no problem.