Citing from official documents of the European Union

yksasa71

Hello folks,
I’ve just started using Zotero, so I apologize if this is a simple question.

I’d like to cite official documents issued by the EU for my master’s thesis. Is manual registration the only way to add these documents to Zotero?
It would be very helpful if they could be registered automatically, like academic papers with DOIs.
I tried using the Zotero Connector, but it doesn’t reflect the information accurately.
If you know of any optimal methods, I’d really appreciate it if you could share.

For example, I’d like to cite a document like this one:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32020R0852

*Also, I apologize if this is a frequently asked question

oreng19

Hi there! Have you figured it out? I’m at a lost also

inh3

Legal and regulatory sources are hard to get right in Zotero due to the preponderance of different formats and jurisdictions (and to be fair this is not a Zotero-specific problem). The Juris-M fork of Zotero went some way to address this, but I think it is no longer updated. That said, I think the answer to your question largely depends on what citation style you are to use, e.g. OSCOLA, Bluebook, Chicago, etc.

In case it would be helpful, here is how I handle legal and regulatory sources (I don't work with EU sources but I routinely cite UN, AU, etc. docs, treaties, and legal cases from relatively obscure jurisdictions). Note, however, that I mainly work with variations of Chicago (Author-Date) where such often need not be included in the References Cited list but are rather just referenced with notes.

I do use the Zotero Connector just to get a snapshot of the page or the PDF into my database, but beyond that the scraped information needs to be manually edited/moved and added to. Not rarely do I need to change the Type (in some cases Standard works better than Statute, in other cases Report, Bill, or Case). It is kind of trial and error what works best. This guide might be helpful: https://libguides.graduateinstitute.ch/zotero/law.

Then, in a new note for the source, I manually format the source as it needs to appear in the manuscript. In Word, I use the Add Note function, not the Add Citation and then get a properly formatted reference in the manuscript where I need it to be (e.g. a footnote).

Note that this means that the formatted source will not appear in a references list at the end, which might be required in your case.

AbeJellinek

@yksasa71:

I tried using the Zotero Connector, but it doesn’t reflect the information accurately.

Please be specific about which fields are getting incorrect values. We should be able to fix that.