Entering several chapters ("book section") from a single edited collection

mcputnam69

Greetings to all,

I'm reading an edited collection of chapters or articles (Zotero calls each a "book section") and there are several in this collection that I want to enter into Zotero and later reference.

Given my level of "expertise," this means that I'll have to enter the editor's name, book title, and year of publication for each one of these several chapters.

I'm wondering if there's a quick way to do this, rather than repeating it manually again and again.

thanks for your support,

Mike Putnam

ajb59

I think that the best thing would be to enter the details of the book itself initially, then select it from the middle pane, and then do 'Create book section' from the context menu of the book entry. You can then either repeat the last step as many times as you have chapters for, or better (see last paragraph for why) duplicate the book section item itself as necessary.

The efficiency comes in getting the details in the book entry right to start with as the relationship of book to book section(s) is not hierarchical and changes to one are not propagated to the other(s).

Putting in a dummy author field in the first of the book section entries that you create (and also moving the chapter author above editor entries) before duplicating it saves a fair amount of otherwise un-necessary effort.

tim820

With some publishers, the book's webpage shows you all the chapters in such a way that the Zotero connector will give you a choice to add the book and/or some or all of the individual chapters. Or there may be a separate web page for each individual chapter that the Connector can add. You just have to look at the book website to see what the publisher exposes to Zotero.

Another way is to make a list of each chapter's DOI, then paste it into Zotero's Add Item(s) by Identifier ...
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/409504/#Comment_409504

mcputnam69

These are very helpful comments, thanks very much. I appreciate the support,

cheers,

Mike