Two distinct reference tables (academic and not academic)

michelwozniak

Hi,

I'm using Zotero for Microsoft Word.
I'm asked to generate two reference tables. One with only academic (peer reviewed) references, and one with non-academic references.
Is it possible with the plugin ? Or it it possible to bold academic references in a unique reference table?
Thank you in advance.

Michel Wozniak

DWL-SDCA

There isn't a Zotero type label to flag academic vs non-academic publications. I'm not aware of a way to segregate items in a bibliography by tags (if you assign acad and non-acad tags to all of your records). I'm hoping that someone might suggest a way to sort the bibliography by item type grouping (blog-post, magazine article, newspaper, personal letter, etc.) but I think that is a false hope. If my hope is realized, you would still need to make a decision about e-print services such as ArXiv, MedRxiv, Zenodo, etc. Is a book or technical report considered by your supervisor to be "peer reviewed"? AND there would need to be a way to group Zotero item types.

Is there a plug-in for this sort of bibliography manipulation?

Someone might have a much more elegant way of accomplishing what you need but if not I have an ugly, crude kludge that will work (with much effort) if you are using an author/date style. If you need a numeric style my plan will not work.

I assume this will still work as I did it in 2007 or 2008, the early days of Zotero (Zotero 3 or before).

Add an exclamation mark (!) as the first character of the lead author's last name for non-academic publications. When you add the bibliography those will sort at the top of the listings. After you finish your document and remove field codes, you will have an ugly bibliography but the lay articles will be sorted first. Elect which (acad or non-acad) should be listed ahead of the other. Assign appropriate headings. Then remove/delete/edit the extraneous exclamation marks from the author names in the non-academic item list.

edit:
How to manage the false author name spellings in your Zotero records will depend upon if you are likely to ever need to segregate a bibliography again. (I created the false !names by duplicating each record and keeping the original record.) The exclamation mark made it easy select the proper false record when citing. It also made it easy to sort my library list by author and eliminate the false-author records after I was finished with the course.

edited a second time in an attempt to make my instructions clearer and to specify when I authored the paper with the painful bibliography. [Even in the earliest days of Zotero it served my needs better than EndNote or Reference Manager.]

edit 3:
Esoteric or eccentric citation requirements in academia are unfortunately not uncommon. A professor at my university currently requires APA 6 and that cites to journals by publishers on Beall's list be rendered in a smaller type point size.