[best practice] Article Types

sdflewrit783

How would one record article types such as: review, opinion, primer, research contribution, letter to the editor and others? It would often be useful to be able to search for specific types in Zotero database without opening PDFs to check the types, and sometimes PDFs do not always have a record for that anyway.

Such as

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u84240/zrhpo9gamicaxxxhf5ng.png

Thanks.

tim820

Tags would be the way to do that. If you want the type to visible in the main pane, you would assign a colour to the tag. If you want to make particular types easily accessible all at once, you would use a saved search.

sdflewrit783

Thank you for the suggestion.

I feel this information needs to reside in references rather than tags. There are many such types, and they are not standard but custom to publishers and journals.

I think for now I shall just use the `Type` field and put that into `Extra` for the Reference Types that do not display `Type`. You can search for that using text strings, but I wish the search function could recognise all fields in Extra and as items to filter by.

And it might be good to add Type as a visible field to Articles.

adamsmith

Definitely don't use "Type" in Extra: that will set the CSL item type to whatever you're writing and cause citations to break.
I'm not convinced we need this as citation metadata: as far as I know, it's not covered in any other metadata schema (including the quite expressive CrossRef ones). I could see a number of places to store that info: in extra as "Annote:", at the beginning of the abstract, in a tag, or as part of a note. All seem fine to me, each with particular pros and cons.