Citing Sources not found in Zotero's "Item Types"?

Dave Datema · August 24, 2023

Normally I have only extreme gratitude for Zotero. But now I am trying to reference things like census records, vital records, etc, items that have no correspondence in Zotero's list of "item types." An entire book has been written, "Zotero for Genealogy," which shows how information for say, a census record, can be put into an existing type format and still "work." Basically, the author gives various "work-arounds" to help force a square peg into a round hole. However, this is a pain-staking process and while it can closely resemble what the citation should be, they are rarely perfect. I did this and then made changes in Word to fix them all, but as other forums state, changes in Word does not translate to Zotero and all my fixes reverted back to the original the next time I cited something. Is it possible to simply not enter this information in Zotero, and add the citations/reference manually using the "footnote" option in Word and then just pasting into the Bibliography? I would be interested to know the pros and cons before spending hours trying to bend Zotero to imperfectly fit my purposes.

adamsmith · August 24, 2023

Is it possible to simply not enter this information in Zotero, and add the citations/reference manually using the "footnote" option in Word and then just pasting into the Bibliography?

Yes. The footnote part will just work. The bibliography you want to do as the very last thing, after unlinking citations (in a copy of the document), otherwise Zotero will just remove the added references every time it updates the bibliography

Eallynm · September 26, 2023

Unless the item type is one that does not need to be changed to fit genealogical citation standards (e.g a journal article or a book), I create my own citation as a footnote in Word that is not linked to an item in Zotero.

I do wish that Zotero had a manuscript parent item for manuscripts that lack specific titles (see CMOS 14.222-14.223) for which one creates a descriptive "title" that should not be in quotation marks according to CMOS. See examples in CMOS 14.229 for some examples with generic titles (not in quotation marks) and specific titles (in quotation marks.)