which item type for Chat-GPT content

paschalia.terzi

Hello, I am a librarian and I am trying to put together a guide on how to cite content produced by Chat-GPT. The three main styles seem to give contradicting guidelines on how to cite this content, for example Chicago says put Chat-GPT as an author but MLA clearly says not to. APA recommends to cite it as software and I have tried to do this but it doesn't work for the other styles. So which item type is the best, if I want to have one record for one prompt? Here are the links to the recommendations according to style:

https://style.mla.org/citing-generative-ai/
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Documentation/faq0422.html
https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/how-to-cite-chatgpt

adamsmith

Add it as software.
APA and MLA treat somewhat different scenarios: One cites the software as a whole, one a specific prompt.
You should be able to get the APA citation displayed as requested with the software item type (putting "Large Language Model", perhaps somewhat awkwardly, into the "System" field). To me, this is the most reasonable model of the three.

For MLA, getting that citation out of "software" with Zotero won't work terribly well I think. Conceptually, adding ChatGPT as the company works best and that'll look right-ish, but won't italicizie it. MLA treats this (quetionably, I'd argue) as a container. You can probably force it to italics by using
Container title: ChatGPT in the Extra field (haven't tested)

I would read the Chicago advice as "don't cite ChatGPT" (i.e., don't put it in the list of references), which is why what they propose doesn't follow standard citation format and I wouldn't generate this with Zotero at all.