Citation

donovanweight

Okay Zotero Community you really helped me out with my last question so here is another one. I have an edited volume that has a ton of diverse sources in it including case law and other notary records that I am citing. How do I keep Zotero from providing all of the citation information about the book every time I go to cite a new document in the book?

Tjowens

I think you might be asking for something Zotero can't deliver. Your best will likely be to go back at the end of your writing process and make some manual tweeks to these citations. However, I can't say for sure without a bit more information.

Could you point to what your particular bibliographic style says items like this should be cited as and offer a few examples of what citations should look like for these items based on that style?

donovanweight

Okay, here is an example. One of the books that I am citing is called Kaskaskia Records by Clarence Alvord. In Kaskaskia Records, Alvord has gathered together several petitions by citizens of the United States to Congress along with some of the Congressional responses. I want to cite both the petitions and the responses in my paper.
My bibliographic style is Chicago Manual of Style full note with bibliography. Usually if you are using a primary source from an edited volume it would appear like this

Memorial by Barthelemi Tardiveau to the United States Congress, 28 February 1788, in Kaskaskia Records, 1778-1790, ed. Clarence Alvord (Springfield IL: Trustees of the Illinois State Historical Library, 1909), 454-462.

However, the next time that I quote anything out of this book it should have an abbreviated form of the book information like this.

Memorial in Favor of American Settlers by Barthelemi Tardiveau, 27 August 1787, in Kaskaskia Records, 1778-1790, 446.

I thought that by putting in all of the documents as sections of a book that it would abbreviate information about the book, but it does not seem to be doing that. Hope that these two examples provide enough information.

fbennett

Thinking out loud ... the response to this is usually that this kind of behavior depends on a hierarchical data model, in which the records and the archive are shown as separate items in the Zotero DB, with the former depending on or pointing to the latter.

Inside the citation formatter, an alternative would be to implement this behavior on the basis of metadata matching. In a book section reference, some of the fields apply to the book, and others apply to the section or chapter. The book data could be tracked internally by the CSL processor, so that later book section references (or book references) that carry the same metadata are stamped as position="subsequent".

The attraction of running things in that way would be that no radical changes inside Zotero would be required to support this kind of dependence. The downside would be that dependence relationships would become fragile; a change to the book metadata would need to be made in all related entries in parallel, or the "connection" seen by the processor would break ... but this fragility could be overcome at a later stage by implementing proper dependency in Zotero, and allowing the (uniform) book data to "show through" in book section items sent to the processor.

There would be some details to work out, with agreement by various stakeholders in the code, but something like this might be doable in the coming year.