Special issues of journals

mark

Sometimes journals bring out a special edited issue. How do I put that kind of info in Zotero? It is not a journal article, it's a whole issue. It's not a book, it's a journal (and its constituents are not book sections, but journal articles).

E.g. the following:
Enfield, Nick J. & Asifa Majid & Miriam van Staden (eds.), 2006. Parts of the body: cross-linguistic categorisation. Special issue of Language Sciences, 28, 2-3, 137-360.


Any thoughts?

MTBradley

To get to:

Fowler, Catherine S. 1983. Some lexical clues to Uto-Aztecan prehistory. ``Papers presented at a symposium on Uto-Aztecan historical linguistics," ed. David S. Rood, special issue, International Journal of American Linguistics 49(3): 224–57.

I enter:

``Papers presented at a symposium on Uto-Aztecan historical linguistics," ed. David S. Rood, special issue, International Journal of American Linguistics

in the "Publication" field. To be clear, I use Zotero to gather citations, then I export the record to BibTeX. So if you use Zotero for citation and bibliography you will have to dink around with the bibliography output as everything in the "Publication" field is italicized in the output (at least in Chicago style).

mark

The major problem of that method is that you lose all the flexibility that Zotero could give you if you would put different kinds of data into different fields. To me, it is against the whole point of citation management to fill the publication field with stuff that is not properly part of the publication title, and so to rob Zotero of intelligence about the editor of the volume and the fact that it's a special issue.

My problem is not how to produce a citation in a specific style, but where to input the relevant data in the fields provided by Zotero such that all that data can be juggled by any citation style template to output the citation style I happen to need.

MTBradley

It's interesting, but you're the very first person I've ever seen address this issue. I get the impression that it hasn't even crossed the minds of 99% of users and developers of citation management software. For example, I've never (ever!) downloaded metadata sufficient to properly reference a special issue of a journal.

bdarcus

I'm of the opinion that in the case you cite you really don't need to indicate that it's a special issue. But you have to realize that to do what you want the correct way would yield a more complex model. You'd essentially have to make explicit that an article is always published as part of an issue, which is part of a journal (or even volume), each of which has a title. So three separate objects/rows linked together (through, for example, foreign key relations in the database).

sean

bdarcus is exactly right here. Along with the bibliontology group, we have also considered this very scenario (and it's outlined in the poorly-named "hierarchical" data model planning document). There two difficult problems here: one is the significantly more complex data model, which bdarcus succinctly describes; the other, more troubling problem is how the UI would work for entering such objects. Can users now create independent "journal" and "issue" items? Do they have to do so before creating a journal article item? Does changing the journal title in one article change that journal title in all other articles from the same journal? Our relatively flat model is much easier to manage, but perhaps a more complicated model may be more useful.

mark

Thanks, all. I conclude that I just leave out the information. It is, I agree with Bruce, not urgently needed anyway.

MTBradley

If I understand correctly the arguement is that since citing in specific styles' ``special issue" styles is unnecessarily complex one shouldn't have to worry about it. I sympathize with that point of view but I think there are a few problems with it. First, if you are the editor of a special issue you really would like to show up in as many citation studies as possible. Second, the logic is driven by the technology. It always worries me when intellectual labor gets its direction from the machine rather than vice-versa. Third, it isn't practical to expect the organizations that issue the style guides to agree to change their ways just because the revision is more logical and efficient.

I'm not a programmer so I don't have the same stake in this, of course.

claudia.faraone

I have been using Zotero (enjoying it) since a long time, and I found the impossibility to archive journal special issues with guest editors limitating. Today I have had finally time to search for a discussion on the topic and found this. I resume it asking if it could be possible to have - along Items types such as Journal Article, Magazine Article, Book Section or Book - also Journal (Special) Issue, on order to archive and cite a Journal in its entirity. Do you think it would be feasible? Thanks for the attention.

bwiernik

A periodical item is coming in a future version. For now, using Journal Article and adding editors is a good solution.

astrowe

Did this ever get added? I've just been using the journal article form, putting down the editors' names, listing the issue title, the words "special issue of" and the journal title in the Publication field, and leaving the "article title" field blank. And figuring that I'll have to go back and edit the final entry.

violawiegand

I was just wondering about the same point as I cannot seem to find a special issue item in the 7.00 beta version. I'll go with a workaround of citing the editorial of that special issue instead, I think. Most if not all special issues I have come across seem to have an editorial, so this may be a way forward for others as well, although this might of course differ across disciplines.