It would be useful for a primary source edited in a PhD dissertation. And if it isn't for most people, they simply won't use it, and it won't bother them as it would be in a scrolling menu. As for now it's not possible to say something like "this source which author is X was edited by Y in his PdD dissertation Z" without recuring to the "Extra" field.
For something that niche (I can't think of any citation style guide that would require that—they would just cite the thesis itself), it isn't worth the clutter and potential confusion for most users. You can personally add these type of data to your library and have them appear in citations by adding additional CSL variables to the Extra field like this: Translator: Last || First
I think generally [3] is the right discussion to look at and I don't think there's been much movement beyond this, certainly not a roadmap.
Personally I'm pragmatic about this -- DOIs are required metadata for countless citation styles, so they're a must and a priority.
PM(C)IDs are already part of CSL, so they're low-hanging fruit and also in quite high demand.
Everything else is, at least to me, in the "would be good to have" category but may well not end up being part of an initial update, especially since there's no way we'll be even close with CSL to add support for it (and then people have all this nicely structured data that they can't cite which is going to cause a lot of grief).
I have two requests for items. I'm not sure if this is the place to put them. If it isn't could I be directed towards the area. In the field of musicology, Zotero is being used more and more. There is one item that doesn't really fit anything. Is there a way to add a "live performance" of like a symphony orchestra or rock concert?
Although it looks like I am two years late in joining this discussion, I would be very interested in reaching @adamsmith for some questions regarding references for anthologies. I have started a conversation on this matter elsewhere; but, I wanted to tie into something about which @adamsmith has already been involved in the hope that it will help me to contact him. Thank you.
Also, is there a more summary of the proposals somewhere? 13 pages is getting hard to read.
Finally, is there a reason that 'Presentation' doesn't have a 'Loc. in Archive'? I would generally vote for making fields as uniform across types as possible. Or even have a user preference that is 'show non-sentical fields' (or similar) that simply shows all fields for all types :)
I agree with @bjohas. I believe that Zotero, in a broad sense, is about managing and providing easy access to the overwhelming information and data around us. At least, there should be a way to be more organized in this forum.
The “book author” is the _author_ (principal writer) of the book, whereas the editor is the person editing the text or coordinating the book. Book Author might be used if the Book Section were, for example, an introduction to a book written by one other author, or a translated chapter in a book or anthology of a person’s works.
I agree that Format should be added to Book/Book Section -- but I worry that we might need to add it to even more formats. I went ahead and added it to the whiteboard.
Sorry - I haven't followed this thread, but has anybody raised the issue of multilinguality here? I didn't see it on the whiteboard, which is why I'm mentioning it here. It's absence in even citation styles is becoming less and less defensible. So for what it's worth - at LEAST a translated (and preferably also a transliterated) title and publication field would be more than welcome.
I would guess that the initial set of updates on fields will be simple, low-hanging fruit, i.e. definitely not multi-linguality. (Its absence is obviously defensible by a simple cost/benefit calculation; no need to go hyperbolic on this. Remember that many Zotero features that have been planned since 2006 haven't been implemented yet. Also, of course, Juris-m does exists for people/groups for whom this is a priority)
We'll definitely not put any related variables in the next CSL release (though original-title and original-author, which could be used for this, already exist), but it's also unclear to what degree CSL even has to play a role here: the main chunk of the implementation of this in juris-m, e.g., doesn't happen through the citation style but through Zotero-wide options and given the many possible permutations of what to include where and how, that always seemed like the right choice to me.
I don't really mean to go 'hyperbolic' on this. I realize few people currently want/need this. My point just is that with a) the (not just quantitative any more, but increasingly also qualitative) explosion of non-Anglo-Saxon-based scientific publications, and b) the exponential improvements in automated translation - the all-too-facile excuse of "I wasn't able to include non-English academic articles in my literature review" is just not going to fly anymore. Whether we like it or not (and I personally both do and don't), the days of Anglo-Saxon academic dominance ARE starting to wane. And the ostrich attitude that the 'bibliographic' community still exhibits really does seem counterproductive to me. As to Zotero and CSL - since only you guys have SOME inkling of the future 'roadmaps' of these things (where can we see - let alone provide feedback on - those "Zotero features that have been planned since 2006 [but] haven't been implemented yet"?), it is hard for us to 'dose' our suggestions on these issues... I understood that the parting of ways between the 'main' Zotero trunk and Frank's MLZ/Juris-M trunk was based on precisely this limitation to add new fields. It seems to me that with 5.1, that limitation is being lifted now. So it's not THAT unreasonable (it seems to me) to ask whether multilinguality could be included as well - now or at some later point.
It's completely reasonable to ask (that's why I answered); it's not reasonable to suggest that everyone who doesn't share your priorities is clueless (and that's what "indefensible" implies).
For CSL -- there is virtually no private communication going on in the project. Everything happens on the discourse forum and/or github. The current thinking on the next minor release is the 1.2 milestone +/- some details: https://github.com/citation-style-language/zotero-bits/milestone/2 (just so people aren't confused -- this is distinct from Zotero: a lot of things requested in this thread are already possible in CSL). There are no specific plans for a 2.0 release, which is at least a year, realistically more like 2+ years, out.
Hello all of you! I really miss some item type and until yet I didn't find a good way to replace it and I didn't find any conversation about this neither. I hope this is the good place to do it.
I want to register a special volume of a journal, with editors and title of the volume but still the reference to the journal edited like a journal paper and not like a book. If you have any suggestion of the item type I should use, it would help a lot!
Example of a paper in such a special volume. As you can say it mixes properties of book (without location and edition) and a journal (with Title of the volume AND Name of the journal and also possibility of abbreviation for it) :
Méniel Patrice, Poplin François, « Relation de l’homme et des animaux dans leur gisement », in Brunaux Jean Louis, Méniel Patrice, Poplin François (dir.), Gournay : Les fouilles sur le sanctuaire et l’oppidum (1975-1984), Revue archéologique de Picardie (RAP), 4, 1985, p. 165‑166.
@danieltomasz Missing ISBN for thesis is a historical oversight. It will likely be added during the field updates. For now, you can store these in Extra like this: ISBN: 978-0-1234-56789
Juridic citation styles need a type ‘Commentary’. Commentaries often come in some kind of a collection that looks like an edited book redacted by some type of editor. The commentaries on the individual sections are often authored by different commentators (authors).
At least for German language juridic citation styles, using ‘Book Section’ for commentaries is inadequate because most of them require the commentary itself being cited in the text itself but that the reference list (if created) contains only the collection once for all commentaries cited from it. The same styles do require the common practice for ‘normal’ book sections — one entry per cited book section in the reference list.
I know that this can’t be achieved as a whole with Zotero currently ignoring hierarchical relations but at least, the existence of a commentary type would prevent the need to use workarounds like misusing a lesser used type (I’ve often seen ‘Encyclopedia article’ in this role) for commentaries.
In a later step, when hierarchies are available, this naturally should be enhanced.
@gduffner If you are doing legal citation, you should try out Juris-M, a third-party version of Zotero with much expanded legal citation support. https://juris-m.github.io
@bwiernik I‘m aware of Juris-M, nevertheless thanks for the advice.
For one, Juris-M doesn’t support an item type "Commentary" either (neither does it seem to support hierarchical relationships). What’s more, I’m not happy with a fragmentation of the CSL by adding features only in application dependent branches. Therefore, I’m asking here in what appears to be the public forum for CSL changes.
Zotero have stated clearly that support for legal and multilingual referencing are not in their development roadmap. A proposal to consider modular style support (essential for the proper implementation of legal styles) was sidelined by CSL, on the grounds that legal referencing is out of scope.
If you want to discuss possible approaches to your requirements, the Jurism circle is where that would happen.
Zotero have stated clearly that support for legal and multilingual referencing are not in their development roadmap.
FWIW, fbennett and I don't completely agree on what this actually means. What is definitely the case is that full legal support as included in Juris-m (parallel citations, jurisdiction-specific citations aka modular styles) isn't going to come to CSL or Zotero in any foreseeable future.
At the same time, we know that standard CSL/Zotero are used both by legal scholars and by other scholars citing legal material and from the CSL end, I'm very much interested in improving our abilities to do so (and I'd assume that's the same for Zotero). One can argue about whether that's an improvement from 30 to 50% or from 60% to 80%, but I definitely think there are low-hanging fruits we can improve.
For commentaries/Kommentare specifically, what I'd want to see before considering is a wider need or a higher level category we can use for it. I'd be reluctant to add an item type that's specific to one discipline in one country.
IMHO, even if legal and ML citation requirements are not mainstream, implementing solutions for them in one general reference management software can prove beneficial for many more users. Thus, edge cases in more mainstream fields could be handled that are now impossible. Also, there are citation styles outside the ML and legal domains that require funny things that we usually find in legal styles (I’ve seen some in the humanities and theology). Only Bibtex and Citavi currently provide that flexibility (eventually, Juris-M is the third real general purpose reference management system).
Nevertheless, I respect the decision of the developers. I’m happy that Zotero is such a good piece of software in general and it’s great that Juris-M is around.
My issue here is with CSL becoming fragmented between different implementations (again, my own opinion). So I’d prefer to have the CSL additions (as long as they don’t have negative impact on the general functionality) in the official CSL specification.
As mentioned, legal texts are cited in many fields, not only by lawyers. I‘m working at a university for business and economics and I’m often confronted with non law students trying to cite legal texts. Even me, during my philological studies had to do so not only once. The problem they’re facing is that style guides if they contain any directions on legal texts at all, in most cases are not verbose enough. “International” styles don’t provide adequate informations for our legal system and the institutional style guides only show basic examples. So, in practice it’s a question of hunting for workarounds and building things analogously to the rest of the style. Thus, @adamsmith, I don’t think that you would find any mention of commentaries or other legal document types (besides laws) in German non legal styles.
Also, I don’t have insight into other regional customs in legal citations. I could imagine that other countries with a long tradition of civil law could show similar peculiarities, especially some in central Europe. Not being a lawyer, I also don’t have contact to people who could help me out on this question.
@gduffner: On the original issue, the requirement for Commentaries (i.e. chapter-level works to be excluded from the bibliography, in favor of an entry for the work as a whole) will be a tough case for both Zotero and Jurism. The Encyclopedia Article workaround probably isn't a bad one, when combined with insertion of the overall-work entry into the bibliography as an uncited item. In Zotero, the unwanted entries could be removed through the bibliography editor. In Jurism, item types can be excluded from the bib by setting on the style, which may or may not be useful in this case. I would agree with Sebastian that adding a Commentary type for this specific case should be avoided if at all possible.
Edge cases like this inevitably come up when pushing toward greater accuracy in citation output, and the idiosyncrasies of input that workarounds sometimes require can steepen the learning curve for using a style to a point where new users find the system as mysterious and intimidating as the style-guide mess itself. To help with that, I've started building a public library of tested samples that users can join and sync as a supplement to documentation. Small steps...
I spoke with several PhDs in legal sciences in Germany, which told me that Zotero works really well for them, after you have figured out the workflow. They are using the "encyclopediaArticle" for commentaries and take the duplicate items of the whole book in the bibliography out (see slide 20 of this presentation).
@fbennett Could duplicate items (i.e. which are looking the same) in the list of references also suppressed automatically? Is there any reason to have them showing up as duplicates (maybe pointing me that I have to reconsider disambiguation rules)?
Upgrade Storage
Translator: Last || First
http://zotero.org/support/kb/item_types_and_fields#citing_fields_from_extra
I see a lot of discussion about bringing DOI fields to all types in Zotero, which is generally agreed to be a very needed thing. I am wondering about some other digital ID schemas and if they, or how they will be supported in Zotero... Two types that I have been encountering recently are urn: [1] and ark: [2], Historically, I have just treated handels [6] as URLs. I see that there is a bit of discussion around the forums [3,4] about broadening the scope of the ID field, but this is a bit different, and yet similar. I also see some discussion on github [5], but I don't see anything definitive or clearly on the road map. ([1b], and [2b] are from my own citations in my current writing project.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name
[1b]: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0009-7-21398
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Resource_Key
[2b]: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k824366/
[3]: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/56659/a-broader-approach-to-ids-oclc-pmid-pmcid-arxivid
[4]: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/62799/bibliotheque-nationale-de-france-translator-issue
[5]: https://github.com/citation-style-language/zotero-bits/wiki/Zotero-types-whiteboard
[6]: http://hdl.handle.net/
Personally I'm pragmatic about this -- DOIs are required metadata for countless citation styles, so they're a must and a priority.
PM(C)IDs are already part of CSL, so they're low-hanging fruit and also in quite high demand.
Everything else is, at least to me, in the "would be good to have" category but may well not end up being part of an initial update, especially since there's no way we'll be even close with CSL to add support for it (and then people have all this nicely structured data that they can't cite which is going to cause a lot of grief).
Also, is there a more summary of the proposals somewhere? 13 pages is getting hard to read.
Finally, is there a reason that 'Presentation' doesn't have a 'Loc. in Archive'? I would generally vote for making fields as uniform across types as possible. Or even have a user preference that is 'show non-sentical fields' (or similar) that simply shows all fields for all types :)
I agree with @bjohas. I believe that Zotero, in a broad sense, is about managing and providing easy access to the overwhelming information and data around us. At least, there should be a way to be more organized in this forum.
Regards,
Ali
We'll definitely not put any related variables in the next CSL release (though original-title and original-author, which could be used for this, already exist), but it's also unclear to what degree CSL even has to play a role here: the main chunk of the implementation of this in juris-m, e.g., doesn't happen through the citation style but through Zotero-wide options and given the many possible permutations of what to include where and how, that always seemed like the right choice to me.
As to Zotero and CSL - since only you guys have SOME inkling of the future 'roadmaps' of these things (where can we see - let alone provide feedback on - those "Zotero features that have been planned since 2006 [but] haven't been implemented yet"?), it is hard for us to 'dose' our suggestions on these issues...
I understood that the parting of ways between the 'main' Zotero trunk and Frank's MLZ/Juris-M trunk was based on precisely this limitation to add new fields. It seems to me that with 5.1, that limitation is being lifted now. So it's not THAT unreasonable (it seems to me) to ask whether multilinguality could be included as well - now or at some later point.
For CSL -- there is virtually no private communication going on in the project. Everything happens on the discourse forum and/or github. The current thinking on the next minor release is the 1.2 milestone +/- some details: https://github.com/citation-style-language/zotero-bits/milestone/2 (just so people aren't confused -- this is distinct from Zotero: a lot of things requested in this thread are already possible in CSL). There are no specific plans for a 2.0 release, which is at least a year, realistically more like 2+ years, out.
Than it's a book... don't you think?
Hello all of you! I really miss some item type and until yet I didn't find a good way to replace it and I didn't find any conversation about this neither. I hope this is the good place to do it.
I want to register a special volume of a journal, with editors and title of the volume but still the reference to the journal edited like a journal paper and not like a book. If you have any suggestion of the item type I should use, it would help a lot!
Example of a paper in such a special volume. As you can say it mixes properties of book (without location and edition) and a journal (with Title of the volume AND Name of the journal and also possibility of abbreviation for it) :
Méniel Patrice, Poplin François, « Relation de l’homme et des animaux dans leur gisement », in Brunaux Jean Louis, Méniel Patrice, Poplin François (dir.), Gournay : Les fouilles sur le sanctuaire et l’oppidum (1975-1984), Revue archéologique de Picardie (RAP), 4, 1985, p. 165‑166.
ISBN: 978-0-1234-56789
At least for German language juridic citation styles, using ‘Book Section’ for commentaries is inadequate because most of them require the commentary itself being cited in the text itself but that the reference list (if created) contains only the collection once for all commentaries cited from it. The same styles do require the common practice for ‘normal’ book sections — one entry per cited book section in the reference list.
I know that this can’t be achieved as a whole with Zotero currently ignoring hierarchical relations but at least, the existence of a commentary type would prevent the need to use workarounds like misusing a lesser used type (I’ve often seen ‘Encyclopedia article’ in this role) for commentaries.
In a later step, when hierarchies are available, this naturally should be enhanced.
For one, Juris-M doesn’t support an item type "Commentary" either (neither does it seem to support hierarchical relationships). What’s more, I’m not happy with a fragmentation of the CSL by adding features only in application dependent branches. Therefore, I’m asking here in what appears to be the public forum for CSL changes.
If you want to discuss possible approaches to your requirements, the Jurism circle is where that would happen.
At the same time, we know that standard CSL/Zotero are used both by legal scholars and by other scholars citing legal material and from the CSL end, I'm very much interested in improving our abilities to do so (and I'd assume that's the same for Zotero). One can argue about whether that's an improvement from 30 to 50% or from 60% to 80%, but I definitely think there are low-hanging fruits we can improve.
For commentaries/Kommentare specifically, what I'd want to see before considering is a wider need or a higher level category we can use for it. I'd be reluctant to add an item type that's specific to one discipline in one country.
Nevertheless, I respect the decision of the developers. I’m happy that Zotero is such a good piece of software in general and it’s great that Juris-M is around.
My issue here is with CSL becoming fragmented between different implementations (again, my own opinion). So I’d prefer to have the CSL additions (as long as they don’t have negative impact on the general functionality) in the official CSL specification.
As mentioned, legal texts are cited in many fields, not only by lawyers. I‘m working at a university for business and economics and I’m often confronted with non law students trying to cite legal texts. Even me, during my philological studies had to do so not only once. The problem they’re facing is that style guides if they contain any directions on legal texts at all, in most cases are not verbose enough. “International” styles don’t provide adequate informations for our legal system and the institutional style guides only show basic examples. So, in practice it’s a question of hunting for workarounds and building things analogously to the rest of the style. Thus, @adamsmith, I don’t think that you would find any mention of commentaries or other legal document types (besides laws) in German non legal styles.
Also, I don’t have insight into other regional customs in legal citations. I could imagine that other countries with a long tradition of civil law could show similar peculiarities, especially some in central Europe. Not being a lawyer, I also don’t have contact to people who could help me out on this question.
Edge cases like this inevitably come up when pushing toward greater accuracy in citation output, and the idiosyncrasies of input that workarounds sometimes require can steepen the learning curve for using a style to a point where new users find the system as mysterious and intimidating as the style-guide mess itself. To help with that, I've started building a public library of tested samples that users can join and sync as a supplement to documentation. Small steps...
@fbennett Could duplicate items (i.e. which are looking the same) in the list of references also suppressed automatically? Is there any reason to have them showing up as duplicates (maybe pointing me that I have to reconsider disambiguation rules)?