Upgrade StorageDifference between Letter and Email item types for citation styles
Hello! First-time Zotero user here.
At my job we write technical reports, and we’d like to add internal traceability for the documents we cite. Because these are very specific internal reports, no standard academic citation style really fits, so I’m trying to create a custom one.
The main item types we work with are emails and letters. However, when I looked at the CSL documentation, I saw that there aren’t separate types for these; there’s only personal_communication. In my tests, Zotero seems to use that for both, so in practice emails and letters are cited the same way in the bibliography.
My question is: is there any way to distinguish between emails and letters when creating a citation style? In other words, can I make a style that produces different bibliography entries for emails and for letters?
Thanks in advance.
At my job we write technical reports, and we’d like to add internal traceability for the documents we cite. Because these are very specific internal reports, no standard academic citation style really fits, so I’m trying to create a custom one.
The main item types we work with are emails and letters. However, when I looked at the CSL documentation, I saw that there aren’t separate types for these; there’s only personal_communication. In my tests, Zotero seems to use that for both, so in practice emails and letters are cited the same way in the bibliography.
My question is: is there any way to distinguish between emails and letters when creating a citation style? In other words, can I make a style that produces different bibliography entries for emails and for letters?
Thanks in advance.
Unless the letters use different fields/variables than the letters you will not be able to easily differentiate them with a CSL style.
If that's the case then you could use and add a certain variable (available from the item's fields or via the extra field) for one of them and then test for that and build out the conditional from there.
Unfortunately, yes, we are using the same fields for both emails and letters (Author, Title/Subject, Date, and URL). Is there a way to make some of these fields mandatory to fill in? We can easily add another variable X to differentiate them, but since the goal is to implement this across my office, we need to keep the chances of user error as low as possible.