Item Type: Grants

dteyhen

Just curious what folks are using to document grants - I could not find a item type that would allow you to track the data that is specific to grants.
I look forward to your suggestions.

adamsmith

does that data need to be cited? If so, in what form?

dteyhen

We are interested in being able to track the following information regarding grants:

Investigator(s)
Year
Title of grant
Activity Location
Sponsoring Agency
Amount Requested
Amount Received
Status
Duration
Funding Type
Original Grant Number
Funding Number
Label
Abstract/Specific Aims
Notes
Collaborating Institutions
Author Address
Last Modified Date

We cite our grant information similar to a journal article - except it would include funding information (amount, organization) and it would typically include specific aims in place of an abstract.

adamsmith

For information that you want to track, but not cite, notes are usually fine.
If grants and associated information is what you're keeping track of mainly, Zotero might not be ideal - it's a bibliography software mainly, rather than a general database solution.

To get advice on putting the right info into the right type for getting grants cited correctly I'd still need to see a sample citation.

dteyhen

Our graduate school is considering switching to Zotero for all faculty and students. As the faculty chair for the research council - I am just investigating if Zotero can track everything we currently track for Scholarly Activity. Most of the items are similar to EndNotes. The only issue we are having are with grants, differentiating conference posters/platforms, and awards. I am not concerned about the last 2 - I think we can make it work. However, grants seems to be a sticky wicket. I even tried to import my grants from EndNotes into Zotero - however, it stripped them of all the relevant information.

In regards to citing grants - in EndNotes we typically use the "annotated" output style and then edit it for our needs. I believe your output styles can be edited - but I have not gotten that far in my exploration of Zotero yet.

I appreciate your insights and comments.

adamsmith

I doubt there'll be a separate "Grant" type in Zotero - not sure if that's going to be a show-stopper.
If it isn't - you could just use a generic item type - document or manuscript maybe - and put everything that doesn't have its own field into "extra" - that would allow you to cite it easily, too - notes can't be cited as handily.
Zotero will definitely not introduce a whole range of custom fields - those are a mess to share and thus go against its core idea.

Also, the Zotero team has worked with NSF on something - I don't actually know what that entailed, but maybe some of that would be useful - maybe Dan or Sean could say something about that.

bdarcus

Well, let me ask this another way: why is there an institutional need to store (and cite?) grants in a reference management solution? Is this just for generating annual activity reports from individual faculty? Something else? Guess I'm curious what you mean by "I am just investigating if Zotero can track everything we currently track for Scholarly Activity." Would you expect to have an account for your school where you stored all faculty research output, and could search that, generate reports, etc.?

Depending on exactly what your needs are, there are a variety of open source options you might also consider:

• BibApp


• DSpace


• even the Drupal-based OpenScholar could be an option, depending

Note: list CSS rules still need work here here; can someone fix it?

dteyhen

We cite grants for multiple types of documents we produce (which require references) each year. This is probably why the other reference managements software tools has a item type specifically for grants. I didn't realize this was such a complicated question. It appears Zotero does not have the ability to cite grants like the other reference management software tools. It appears we will either need to use the generic "document" type or decide to not switch to Zotero. I appreciate the information.

ajlyon

Can you provide example citations for grants, from the documents you do produce that use them? The question of whether it will work is tightly bound up with what exactly you need to produce as output.

I have an inkling that Report (and a custom style) might work for you, but I need to see example citations to say much for sure.

bdarcus

We cite grants for multiple types of documents we produce (which require references) each year.

Can you please be more specific? Who is "we" and how do you "cite"? In what "types of documents"?

E.g. what do the citations and/or references actually look like in what context?

This is probably why the other reference managements software tools has a item type specifically for grants. I didn't realize this was such a complicated question. It appears Zotero does not have the ability to cite grants like the other reference management software tools. It appears we will either need to use the generic "document" type or decide to not switch to Zotero.

I'm not a Zotero developer, but I did create the style language it uses. I ask these questions of all type requests because you have to realize, if we (CSL and Zotero) just added any type people asked for without understanding the precise needs, we could easily end up with 200 of them, without much logic. The result would be a significant level of confusion.

And simply copying what Endnote does is seldom a good approach, given many of us aren't big fans of the application.

If you can show us an example of where a grant is cited and how, I will support adding it to CSL at least (which is actually used by a number of apps beyond Zotero now).

dteyhen

Below is an example that has been sanitzed for web posting. It is very similar to journal citation except it includes the duration of grant (instead of year), location of study (instead of journal name), funded amount, and associated log numbers. I hope that helps - I appreciate the insight as I explore this new software option for our graduate school.

Simple Reference - without abstract/specific aim:

Last AB, Last2 AB, Last 3 AB. Title XXXXX XXXXX: XXXX XXXX XXXXX (01/01/05-09/30/09), Location of Study ($1,008,426), National Insitute of Health: Proposal Log Number XXXXX, Award Number XXXXX, HSRRB Log Number XXXX.

Also - could add abstract or specific aim - depending on format of the document. (annotated bibliography).

The specific aim of this project is to XXXXX.

The inforamtion we enter into EndNotes currently is posted above.

Thank You.

hughp3

I too am looking to be able to cite grants. In line citation would be (Grant recipient Last-name, grant award date YYYY) OR (Awarding Institute, Grant ID)

Example:::s of inline citation:; (Smith 2004) OR (NSF 0800321)

And in the bibliography I need as @dteyhen suggests:;

Grant-Recipient-Last-Name, First-Name. Date-of-Award. Grant Title. (Project Funding duration Dates). Location of Study or Receiving institution. (Amount of Award). Grant Bestower. Grant Bestower ID number. URL of online Grant Reference.

In my work in linguistics I use this kind of citation in four places:;
1. When writing a CV
2. When writing a grant proposal and referencing previous awards
3. When writing a report about current activities
4. When writing academic articles/chapters discussing the history of a project.
5. Occasionally I have cited a grant proposal too, which is a little different...

bwiernik

In my grant apps, I actually would love to have “Grant” type, most importantly with a “Principal Investigator” creator type. I often have to cite grants that we have previously received. Right now, I use Report and add “(PI)” after the given name, but that creates some issues with disambiguation.