Citavi like behaviour

studiosusmed

Dear Zotero Team,

many thanks for this great application! It is wonderful. However, I'm missing a feature which is - from my perspective - quite basic in Zotero.

For me it is hard to manage quotations handy and automatically. The note function is not giving me the ability I'm looking for.

A good example on how to deal with many quotations is Citavi (http://citavi.com/en/beta.html). As you may (not) see from the picture http://citavi.com/en/beta2.html, it has it's own window to give the location of the quotation with page number and diverse options for formatting. Furthermore it is possible to directly transfer the quote to the word processor. This is comfortable, because Citavi has already formatted it with the selected citation style. This means that the page number, the Author or all details that are present for the particular style are integrated.

Especially for "flowing" while writing this option is helpful a lot. I really would like to see something like this in Zotero.

Thanks for reading. Please go on with the project it is awesome!

bdarcus

I agree this would be nice, but there's been some previous debate here about how best to do it. I tend to be more in favor of extending the current note interface to enable attaching citation information to quotes.

ajlyon

This is comfortable, because Citavi has already formatted it with the selected citation style. This means that the page number, the Author or all details that are present for the particular style are integrated.

When you say citation style, do you mean journal-specific rules for quoting (i.e., indentation, spacing, use of quotation marks) or do you mean that the citation string (Jones 2001a, p. 123) is conformant to the journal's requirements? Quoting rules are currently considered outside the scope of the citation style language, and it will probably stay that way.

I am firmly in agreement with Bruce's position that Zotero's notes system should support citations (rather, references to items with pinpoints), so that we can get more meaningful connections between items.

studiosusmed

Thanks for your comments.

I have to admit ajlyon that I'm not fully understanding your question. For that reason I copied from Citavi a quote first over an assistant, which helps to formate the document afterwards. The second example is just the copied quote.

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»Only cite those references that are essential to justify your proposed study. Three citations from different groups usually are enough to convince most assessors that some fact is “well known” or “well recognised,” particularly if the studies are from different countries.« {Hall 2004 #1: 2}

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»Only cite those references that are essential to justify your proposed study. Three citations from different groups usually are enough to convince most assessors that some fact is “well known” or “well recognised,” particularly if the studies are from
different countries.« (Hall, G. M. (2004). How to write a paper. London: BMJ Books. Retrieved from http://www.gbv.de/dms/bowker/toc/9780727917287.pdf, p. 2)

adamsmith

so you mean the citation string ( in your case: (Hall, G. M. (2004). How to write a paper. London: BMJ Books. Retrieved from http://www.gbv.de/dms/bowker/toc/9780727917287.pdf, p. 2) )

ajlyon was referring to specific requirements for citations with respect to the type of quotation marks around a citation, whether citations should be indented and single spaced etc. - it seems pretty clear to me that Citavi doesn't do that nor should Zotero.

ajlyon

I think that if Zotero made it possible to add citations to notes, then we would hope for pretty much exactly Citavi's behaviour when snippets of text that have been collected as notes are copied into a document in progress -- the word processor plugin should notice that the text being pasted has a Zotero citation in it and format it appropriately for the current style.

nschneid

Storing quotations/excerpts in a structured way with locator information (e.g. chapter, page numbers) within the work would indeed be quite useful. Have there been any recent developments on this front?

(cf. http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/210/?Focus=855 and http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1010/quotes-religious-texts/)

adamsmith

no, unfortunately not.