Is it possible for citations to include related documents ?

CelianGdfrd

I am a researcher in French law. We have legal cases that are commented in journals.

I'd like to find a way to reference these articles as standalone documents (article-journal), relate them to legal-case document in Zotero, and create a citation rule to shape the citation in a satisfactory way. "container-title" fields aren't a possibility in my case.

Thanks !

tim820

I assume you are talking about how the citation would look in a bibliography ? Perhaps if you showed an example of how you would like the citation to look (including the base bibliographic style), someone may have some ideas on how to do it. I'm not a legal scholar, but I wonder if methods for annotated bibliographies might be adapted ? (ie inserting the case details in the Extra field). However that is only available for a few bibliographic styles currently.

CelianGdfrd

Your solution could work !! I'll look into it.

Here's an example. A decision is set by the Cour de Cassation (one of the highest courts in France), within its third civil chamber, on the 1st of January 2024. Citation rules for this decision should be :

Cass. civ. 3e, 1er janvier 2024 (n°12-12.345).

This decision is now so important that it receives a commentary in the Recueil Dalloz (one of the main commentary journals), in its 2024 edition, at page 966, by Léon Duguit (famous law scholar, died in 1928, whatever). Citation rule now becomes :

Cass. civ. 3e, 1er janvier 2024 (n°12-12.345), com. Duguit, D. 2024.966

Now, what I was thinking is : by registering the decision as "legal-case", and the commentary as "article-journal", and linking both documents, citing the legal case in my document would detect the linked document, and with the fields of the commentary, add the last part of the citation automatically.

Note : I know how to manage styles, I created one for French law researchers (https://framagit.org/CelianGdfrd/zot-juristhese-fr/), but I couldn't find a way to do this in the citation editor.

adamsmith

sorry, those types of parallel citations -- be it for two legal cases or a legal case and a journal articles -- don't work automatically in Zotero. If you want the article in the bibliography, the only option I see is to create a citation with two items.
Alternatively, for anglo-style parallel citations, we've used the "History" field ("references" in Zotero) but that'd just hard code the commentary as a part of the original citation in one single format, so is much less flexible.

CelianGdfrd

Yeah, I believe I'll do that -- cite the legal case for the first part, then the article for the second, with a keyword in Extra so the citation form fits.

Thank you, hope to maybe see this in the future !