Bug: Number of Pages Lost

RobertsMark

When changing an item type from Journal Article to Standard (or vice versa), the number of pages is lost. I'm assuming this is caused by the fields being named different. One is titled "Pages", and the other is titled "# of Pages". This may be a problem too with other items that have their page counts titled differently.

If there is a reason for why the titles need to be different, Zotero should still be capable of easily handling the translation on its own without user intervention.

dstillman

The fields have different names because they're not the same field. "Pages" is the page range of an article in a journal. "# of Pages" is the number of pages of a book or similar. Zotero always preserves equivalent fields when switching item types regardless of the display name, but there's no equivalent field here.

adamsmith

No, that's not a bug and entirely on purpose: those are two different fields, with different meanings, and different mappings in citation styles, which is why they don't get converted:
Pages is the page range (like 123-137), typically of a chapter or article, whereas # of pages is the total number of pages, typically of a individually published item. It wouldn't make sense for one to travel to the other (and would potentially cause confusion and incorrect citations).

RobertsMark

Thanks for the explanation.

Would it not make more sense then to title one of these “Page Range”?

adamsmith

I don't think this has come up as a source of confusion before (and the brevity of Pages is an advantage) -- I'd guess it's intuitive to most users because that's how you actually talk about page ranges: "The chapter is on pages 123 to 137"