Indicating a chapter for a book section in eBook

jcmeunier

I have a book section in an eBook format.
Normally, I should indicate the page range of the whole section, but there are none.

How can indicate the chapter?
Write "Ch. 16" in the page field?
Or is there something for this in the extra field?

bwiernik

You can put this in Extra:
Chapter number: 16

Though not many styles are set up to print Chapter numbers. If the chapter or book has a DOI, I probably wouldn’t worry about whether other locations show or not.

Most ebook webpages show the corresponding page numbers from the print edition, so I would personally just include the print page numbers in citation

jcmeunier

Thank you VERY much. In MLA, this works perfectly ;-)

iagogv

For when a Chapter/Chapter number field for the Book section item type? It is weird that sometimes the translator gets the item title starting by Chapter x ...

aborel

If a translator cannot recognize the chapter number, having a dedicated field in Zotero will not help much - the translator needs to be fixed first (to store the information as an Extra, at least for now). And here I assume that the original metadata distinguishes the chapter number from the actual title, which is perhaps over-optimistic.

Can you list some specific examples?

iagogv

@aborel Indeed. There are various options.

Sometimes, the chapter name starts with 'Chapter x' or directly with a number, and then, separated with a dot or dash or colon, of the actual name. In that case, translators should split the title, so the saved title would be the second part, while could check for the chapter number along the first part. Examples: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0083672910830213
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S156973391070014X
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780125321044500342

If the chapter have a doi, usually it ends with an underscore followed by the chapter number (ok, I know usually it does not too, maybe becasue the doi is that of the full book). Examples:
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7414-8_10
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3527-7_5

I've just realized that there are editorial patterns, being Elsevier the first examples and Springer the second ones

And when there is no metadata, but there is chapter number, maybe translators can do som web-scrapping. For example, in the source for the webpage https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/2392/chapter-standard/625492/Cognition-and-Communication-in-Prairie-Dogs
one can find

<h1 class="chapter-title">
32: Cognition and Communication in Prairie Dogs
<i class='icon-availability_open' title='Open Access' ></i> </h1>

and again as in the first examples, splitting the title suitably.

aborel

That's the problem: all translators cannot magically support all of these editorial variants, that may be systematic or not on every platform.

If you can identify reliable patterns on a given platform, I encourage you to submit an issue on https://github.com/zotero/translators/issues with a couple of examples, maybe a link to this thread, and someone will be able to improve the relevant translator.

iagogv

@aborel at this point we may ask what to do first? Modifying translators for detecting the chapter number when there is no a Chapter (number) field, or adding a Chapter number field which would not be filled by any translator initially.

Of course, the most suitable path would be to do both steps simultaneously, but being this not possible, I would bet for the second. I do not believe submitting an issue for adapting translators to a field that does not exist currently will be useful at all.

aborel

As mentioned in the 2nd message of this thread, there is some support for chapter numbers in the current Zotero metadata schema, through an "Extra" field.

As for evolutions of the schema itself, we know it is planned, we can guess with reasonable confidence that it will wait at least until Zotero 7 is out of beta, but beyond that we don't know what priority it will have. We do know that Extra fields will be automatically mapped to a corresponding "native" field when one becomes available (the DOI for various reference types is a frequently requested example). The likelihood of a point change just for chapter numbers is extremely low in my opinion, especially because the standardization of that information in published metadata is not clear. I hope the approach that I suggest will help to clarify the availability of said info, platform after platform.

So basically, my bet is strongly in favor of improving the translators, which can be done right now and will need to be done anyway. Obviously they will need to be tweaked again later if/when the relevant field becomes available, but ideally that should not impact the users in any observable way.

Of course, waiting an indefinite amount of time is also an option :-)

Anyway, this is just my perception. Feel free to disagree.

iagogv

@aborel Well, there is not a strong disagreement, your arguments are very reasonable. ;)

Thanks for the feedback.

aborel

Thanks for yours! I was worried about getting carried away.