Multiple Dates and Multi-Year Publications

dmichon

Dear Zotero,

First, I love Zotero and will keep using it no matter what. It is amazing.

Back in 2009 I asked about multiple dates and multi-year publications. Some said a fix was in the works. I still can't do it. What I need, very often, is this:

Some books are published over years, so the dates needs to be "1969-70" or "1969-1975". Zotero just puts in the first and ignores the second.

Or, I need original dates, say, "1999 [1875]"

Again, it doesn't work.

I have a workaround for the first, I put in "1969md70" and then I have to go back when I am done and do a find and replace for alll "md"'s with "-". But the original publish date is much harder.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Daniel

adamsmith

I'm not aware of any good workarounds, no, but csl (the citation style format for Zotero) already supports date ranges and original date of publication. I think the hope is to get that into Zotero 2.2

krahv

I have exactly the same problem, in my case there are archival sources that are dated as "1975/76" or "1984-86". My workaround is the same - replacing combination of rubbish inserted between dates later in MS Word. In Zotero Standalone this option is still missing. Any chance to get it in upcoming versions? Or it is purely an CSL problem? As much as I understand, CSL 1.0 still does not support date ranges...

fbennett

@krahv,

CSL 1.0 and citeproc-js do support date ranges, it's just not been hooked up yet in Zotero.

Depending on how much time you have to spare and how comfortable you are with development things, you could take a look at the date support in multilingual Zotero (MLZ). In MLZ, date parsing is done by the citeproc-js parser directly, which is able to handle date ranges.

MLZ is an experimental branch of the official version, and unsupported by the core developers. As with any experimental software, you should back up your data carefully before installing it. On the positive side, some experienced users are relying on it for production work, and it is database-compatible with the official version (you should be able to install MLZ, run it, and then reinstall official Zotero over the same data).

If you do give it a try, let us know whether it works as you expect.

bdarcus

I'd say the problem is likely more on the Zotero end, since it basically takes a free-text field and parses it into some internal representation; a representation I can only assume doesn't include ranges or lists.

My intention is that CSL supports a subset of the new (currently in draft) EDTF spec.

http://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/spec.html

I would hope Zotero would follow suit.

fbennett

Bruce and I are on the same page on this; we both hope to see Zotero adopt the EDTF draft as the internal date format that is passed to the processor.

What I say about MLZ above is correct, though, and I should perhaps explain a little further. Zotero stores two copies of the date internally: the internal representation (which as Bruce says currently does not support ranges); and the visual form (the text entered in the field or scraped by the translator). What MLZ does currently is to pass the visual form directly to the citation processor, which does its own parse of the string, ignoring the internal represention. This is not a permanent solution, but it does work, and it allows ranged dates to be tested in Zotero against live data.

And field testing is important.

Devin Roza

Is it possible to just have Zotero display the "visual form" of the text typed into the Date field? That would be the easiest solution. I need this for multi-volume works where I have to include the individual date of each work, all in one field.