Conference Names do not appear in Bibliography

peterm

I have conference names in the 'conference name' field. But, when I try to print my bibliography, the name of the conference does not appear in several citation styles I've tried. These are conferences without proceedings. I can put the conference name in the proceedings field and then it will print, but it gets prefaced with an "In...", which is not appropriate. Shouldn't the bibliography display the name of the conference such as "Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting"?

adamsmith

presentations at conferences without proceedings should be filed as "presentations"
"Conference Paper" is for conferences with proceedings.

peterm

Just to clarify: I do not see the conference name when I paste the bibliography directly from Zotero in Firefox into a file (right-click; Create Bibliography from Selected Item...). I am unable to test whether the conference name appears in OpenOffice because my OpenOffice Zotero toolbar does not open a dialog box when I click "Insert Citation." I'm using Zotero 2.0.2, Zotero OpenOffice Integration 3.0a7, OpenOffice 3.1.1, on an up to date Ubuntu Linux Karmic 9.10 64-bit system/

adamsmith

that's unrelated - for your Ooo plugin see one of the multiple related threads - it's probably a java issue -
some style don't deal with presentations correctly - so you'd have to be specific about which one you're referring to - but as I said - see above for how to enter presentations at a conference with no proceedings.

peterm

Thanks for your reply adamsmith. It's helpful, but I don't know quite how to address the problems this creates for my bibliography.

Most conferences in my three academic fields do not have published proceedings, but we do deliver conference papers. It used to be that Zotero would not have problems with such conference papers--I have about 100 entries in Zotero with conference names, but no proceedings. Previously, the conference names where stored as titles, I believe, and they printed into bibliographies. Now, I can't get the conference name to print in the Conference Paper entry type (and I lost all my conference names when I exported and reimported in .rdf format--had to fix this by hand).

It looks like fixing this will be time consuming. I just tried to convert one of my citations from Conference Paper to Presentations and it tells me it will erase the conference name field. Wish it would simply move that to Meeting Place in the new data entry type.

Once I do have it in Presentation format, the conference place and meeting name do not print out in the bibliography in American Political Science Assoc. style, but do print out in APA style.

Zotero users are not in a good spot when changes are made to entry types that affect large numbers of their citations, requiring by-hand fixes, and when the changes are not consistent with available citation styles.

adamsmith

The APSA style doesn't do presentations right, that's correct - it never has - it just treats them as chapters. (which must be what you remember from earlier on - so you could still get the old behavior by putting the conference title in the Proceedings field).
I believe the whole change consisted in adding a field - so users weren't actually affected.

It's relatively easy to adjust styles - the conference name can be called by
<text variable="event"/>
if you're even moderately tech-savvy this won't take you a lot of time to figure out how to do this for the style you require:
http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits

It looks like fixing this will be time consuming. I just tried to convert one of my citations from Conference Paper to Presentations and it tells me it will erase the conference name field. Wish it would simply move that to Meeting Place in the new data entry type.

yes you're right, that should be changed.

peterm

Well, looks like I tripped myself up when I unintentionally erased the conference names. But, it also seems there was more going on than simply adding a field--I used to be able to print conference names from the Conference Paper entry type, and now I can't.

Anyhow, part of your last comment seems to stop in mid-sentence. Sounds like you are suggesting I alter the style to print conference names from the Conference Paper entry type?

adamsmith

fixed - sorry about that.
What I think happened is that the "conference name" field got moved (automatically) to proceedings title to avoid confusion - people had put the conference name in and were then surprised to find the "in" formatting you describe above - so if you had your data in zotero at all times you didn't even notice.
You were just unfortunate in that this didn't happen for you because of the import/export mishap.