author book vs author book section

Perhaps I'm missing the obvious but for book-sections it often does not seem to be clear how one adds the author of the book in which the book-section (like a letter written by someone else) was published.

If I call both the author of the book and the author of the book-section "author," then it appears as if the author of the book would have been the co-author of the book-section (which in many cases would be inaccurate).

At the same time, I cannot differentiate between both by calling the author of the book-section "author" and the author of the book "editor," because the latter did not edit but author the book.

What would be the convention for representing the author of the book here? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
  • I don't see how you can do that with the current approach, which essentially takes some short-cuts to say that the author by definition refers to the book.

    With the "hierarchical" model that's been under discussion, you'd assign author to the appropriate objects: the source proper and the enclosing book.
  • It seems to me that the "book section" is missing an "editors" field.
  • Nope--if you mean when you are creating an entry in Zotero, click the "Author:" & select "Editor:". If you mean when you cite it, please list the specific style that lacks tis field.
  • edited February 27, 2009
    I fully understand what raf was talking about and in my opinion there is no solution of this in Zotero so far: i.e. I have a catalog by the German artist Thomas Struth, and I want to cite an article from that catalog - Struth is in no way the editor of the book, neither is he the co-author of the text, he is the author of the book, and the author of the text is the author of the text and this is something that cannot be done in Zotero up to 1.0.9, it's a feature I miss a lot!
  • could you give an example of how that would be cited in any relatively common style?
  • edited March 2, 2009
    Here's an example that might illustrate the problem:

    Stuhlmacher, Peter. Revisiting Paul’s Doctrine of Justification: A Challenge to the New Perspective. Downers Grove: IVP, 2002.

    This volume is authored by Peter Stuhlmacher, but contains an essay, which is the final chapter, by Donald A. Hagner. If I wanted to cite that essay, I'd want something like this (according to CMOS/Turabian):

    Donald A. Hagner, “Paul and Judaism: Testing the New Perspective,” in Revisiting Paul’s Doctrine of Justification: A Challenge to the New Perspective, by Peter Stuhlmacher (Downers Grove: IVP, 2002), 75–105.

    This seems closely related to the inability to properly cite forewords, prefaces, introductions, and afterwords written by other authors. See the thread Introduction By.
  • This is what the 'container-author' variable in CSL is intended to address. It's already added to CSL. There just needs to be a way to store the data in Zotero.
  • There is a ticket for this.
  • http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/917/introduction-by/#Item_30
This discussion has been closed.