Changes to fields and item types for Zotero 5.1

17810121317
  • By "priority date" you mean "priority numbers"? Would those ever be cited? How?

    By the second request you would like all citations from and to the patent listed? That's definitely far out of scope for this thread and I doubt it'll happen more generally any time soon.
  • In the creator field we already have the option "Editor" but I also would like to have "Organizer" because many book mention the editor as organizer.
  • @PeresGil Do you mean "organizer" as "editorial director" ("directeur de la publication" in French)? If so, such a field will likely be added to book and chapter items in the future.
  • @bwiernik Yes, organizer of the book in the same sense as editor of the book. It is for books and book sections/chapters, yes. Thanks/Merci bien.
  • Is it possible to add something to cite e-books that don't have page numbers - e.g. many of the e-books on Amazon, Scribd and Google books do not have page numbers but place numbers which have to be cited differently. Perhaps an e-books category would help with this?
  • There has been discussion of ebook location citing. It’s a challenging issue, as many of these locations are not stable across screen sizes, devices, font sizes, etc. My recommendation would be to cite either the chapter or paragraph using the Zotero locator field in the Word plugin (change “page” in the drop down) and to label the book as an ebook by placing this in the Extra field:

    medium: Ebook
    or
    medium: Kindle book
  • edited August 10, 2017
    Priority Date (or Earliest Priority Date) is important for a lot of ip-related research, as it established the effective start date of patent coverage. It is sometimes but very often not the same as the Filing Date- it could be the filing date of a previous related patent, provisional application, or foreign filing. * It is provided as a discrete field by Google, and appended to priority numbers in Espacenet and USPTO.

    Check out the bibliographic data for this patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8095854B2/en

    The priority date is 5 years before the filing date, meaning once the patent issued, it retroactively covered the inventors/assignee back to 2002, even though it wasn't filed until 2007. If you were being sued for infringing this patent, you might try to invalidate it by locating prior-art patents with an earlier priority date (or journal articles with an earlier publication date). In practice, anyone who deals regularly with patents would look at priority dates and would have use for them in bibliographies, reports, and spreadsheets.

    *editing to add that while Google Patents provides priority date as a discrete field, Espacenet (and the USPTO site) provide it as raw data appended to the priority number. It looks like Google is parsing priority number data and displaying the earliest date.
  • @jahooper, new issue created: https://github.com/citation-style-language/zotero-bits/issues/76. I agree that Zotero should store the priority date. Let us know if you are aware of priority dates ever showing up in citations (in which case we also need to make the priority date available in CSL).

    (regarding your "forward/backward patent and non-patent citations", you might be interested to know that https://www.lens.org/lens/ just introduced PatCite this month to look up this information: https://www.lens.org/lens/patcite)
  • Couldn't it be useful to have the fields: Original Date and Original Author? For the moment I am using them in the "Etra" field as "original-date: yyyy" and "original-author: xyz". This fields are important when you are citing an old book in a more recent edition (let's say Hobbes' Leviathan) that can not be quoted in bibliography as (Hobbes 2006) or similar. A similar argument is valid for translations. If I am citing a French book of 1956 translated in Italian in 1989 I need to cite it as (Sartre 1956) but also give the translation or current edition employed to retrieve page numbers.

    I am new to the Zoter app but I got very enthusiast in the last week; I am trying to consolidate a possible workflow
  • Formal support for original publication information is planned. It is likely that "original-date:" variables stored in Extra will be automatically migrated.

    For "original-author", you should generally just store these as regular "Author" creators. Editors/translators/etc. should also be entered using the normal fields. There really isn't much use case for the "original-author" variable (it only really would apply in cases where you don't regularly cite the original author, which is rarely the case—see here: https://github.com/citation-style-language/documentation/issues/42)
  • @bwiernik
    thanks for the answer; I did a typo, I was thinking about "original-title", not "original-author"; sorry.
  • We have to think a little about how to handle original title (which is particularly tricky for titles in non-Latin letters), but I'd love to get it into 5.1; if not, the next field update won't take as long as this one.
  • edited September 29, 2017
    @adamsmith
    this field would be extremely useful also for sorting purposes when displaying authors bibliographies

    edit: I think that the possibility to shrink the empty fields in the INFO tab would enhance the readability of the TAB; what about a button that toggles between modify and read status of the INFO tab?

    edit2: What about the possibility to create single records that contain multiple translations of the same document? At the moment if a book was translated, say, five times, if I am working on interpretation or collation or similar I need to have five different entries, whereas it would be maybe handy to collect them under the same record.
  • edited September 29, 2017
    (Off-topic but:
    edit1 has been discussed here, old ticket there) ;
    edit2 too is sometimes called "hierarchical item relationships" and has been discussed from (almost) the beginning of Zotero. See also: books and book sections and semantic relations)
  • I would find it helpful to be able to define a custom item type *within* an existing item type, i.e., have a text field for "sub-type" or something that appears in each item regardless of type, which does not affect the characteristics of anything, but which would allow me to make it a column header in library settings so I can sort by that instead of sorting by item type.

    That way people could use the official item type that best matches the citation needs of the item, but could still give the item a custom type that is more meaningful when using the library for everyday use.
  • Hi to all
    Would it be possible to add a new item such as exhibition catalogue?
    It has already been discussed in a previous post but it does not seem to have come back in the discussion about Zotero 5.1.
    I guess that it would be sufficient to add two new fields, one with a date range, the second being the exhibition place.
    Thus it would be possible to comply with CMoS 17 but also with ISO690 (see an example there, on pages 2-3).
  • Hi all,

    I had a look a the introduction to this thread. I guess these are basic suggestions, and may conflict with the idea of 'types' representing 'formatting', but there goes.

    (1) We deal a lot in "white papers". These aren't reports, nor are they conference papers or journal articles. They would include policy papers, and could be seen as short-form books.

    (2) We also deal a lot in teaching and learning materials (TLMs), e.g producing materials that range from course book (primary -> tertiary) to lecture notes.

    Could you suggest how to represent them currently, or, if needed, consider for inclusion?

    Thanks!!
  • I always cite whitepapers as reports -- what is the problem with that?

    TLMs I'm less sure about; I guess I'd start by asking how they're cited.
  • edited January 24, 2018
    Thanks! I guess they can be formatted as reports, no problems. Similarly, TLMs can be formatted as books. Perhaps what I'm really after is an extra field, that allows me to set the type or subtype, according to how we classify materials. That would also be helpful for annotated bibliographies.

    A related question - I'm sure "custom fields" have been considered? (Also see https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/51476/using-the-extra-field-to-add-more-info-citation-count, https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/64303/is-it-possible-to-add-extra-metadata-fields)

    Clearly they wouldn't map to CSL well (as nobody would know about it), but perhaps the point would be exactly that: to have a custom field that is NOT mapped by default. This allow people to write custom renderers or make custom use of the API. What do you think?
  • Unrelated to your custom fields idea--

    I've seen articles reporting the results of studies of the nature of graduate course materials. The way these are listed in the reference list suggests that they should be stored in Zotero as a report type. The nature of the item is included in the title. The developer of the item as author and the institute as publisher.

    Chen V. (1987). Syllabus: Chronic disease epidemiology (PH-6233). New Orleans: Tulane University.

    Chen V. (1987). Lecture notes (Chronic disease epidemiology): Cancer registries. New Orleans: Tulane University.
  • This isn't something I'm involved with, but my understanding is that Zotero is planning to introduce custom item types and fields in the medium run. I have no idea how long this might be -- anything from later this year to not for another 5 seems possible.
  • edited January 25, 2018
    “Report” is generally useful as any form of less-formally published material (white papers, even teaching materials), with be Type field describing the continent. For Specific citation uses or needs that this might not cover, please describe in this thread.
  • Regarding custom fields - for systematic reviews (c.f. "EPPI-Reviewer 4") it would also be helpful to have custom fields to systematically collect data about the paper (e.g. number of participants in study). Much the generally setting of codes could just be through tags (i.e. binary decisions), but for certain aspects, key:value pairs (i.e. custom fields) would be helpful.
  • For sound recordings (in particular), have you all considered adding a field for the issue number (or matrix number in the case of some recordings)? Chicago 17 14.263 does have examples using the issue number, and for those of us who frequently use or compile discographies, having this field available would save a few steps.

    For items pulled from WorldCat, this information is usually in the 028 $a field (and $b is the recording label) if that's any help at all. BTW, this same MARC field is used to indicate plate number or catalog number and publisher for music scores. Thank you for your consideration!
  • Is that what Chicago calls the acquisition number, i.e. PVT 7183 for the New York Trumpet Ensemble citation there?
  • Yup. That's example 2 on that page. :)
  • Just adding note from https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8014/no-doi-field-for-books here: DOIs for all items are planned.
  • I noticed that the blog post / web page items don't have "organisation", and in the list 'publisher' remains empty. (While for other item types the 'publisher' column in the list is sometimes filled with another appropriate field, e.g. institution).

    Not sure what the purpose of 'Website Title' is (in web page item type) - but would it be an idea to add 'website' as an field to blog post / web page (or repurpose 'website title'). I would suggest that this field is autofilled by the connector with the host name (i.e. stripping the protocol and path).
  • @LiborA second that on "cites/cited by". What do you use in the interim to manage this information?
Sign In or Register to comment.