Upgrade StorageAdditional fields needed for Conference Paper
The Conference Paper item type is set up to handle published conference proceedings. However, no item type in zotero can handle in a straightforward way conference presentations that are unpublished. Posters and standalone talks can be accommodated using the "Presentation" item type, but symposiums and other multi-presenter conference presentations cannot be easily recorded and referenced. These types of presentations are frequently cited in psychology, especially in newly-developing topic areas and by authors doing literature reviews and meta-analyses. At present, there is no way for zotero to conform to APA 6th edition style correctly for these presentations.
A correctly worded APA reference for a symposium is:
Wiernik, B. M. (2013, April). Effects of respondent characteristics on organizational employee sustainability survey responses. In Dilchert, S. & Wiernik, B. M. (Chairs), Practical lessons in survey methods for measuring employee green behaviors. Symposium conducted at the annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Houston, Texas.
To fix this problem, a few simple changes to the "Conference Paper" item type need to be made. These changes have the added advantage of allowing all forms of conference presentations, published, unpublished, poster, symposium, paper, etc., to be recorded using the same "Conference Paper" item type.
Necessary technical change:
1. Add a "Type" or "Session Type" field mapped to CSL 'genre'. This field is used to conditionally format the references for different session types (poster vs paper vs symposium). It would be ignored for conference papers published in proceedings.
Preferred changes:
2. Add a "Chair" subfield to the contributor field mapped to CSL 'container-author'. At present, this can be approximated by using the "Series Editor" field, but this is not ideal and it may be problematic when citing works that are actually part of a series with a series editor (depending on how the coding is implemented for the style).
3. Add a "Session Title" field mapped to CSL 'container-title'. This is purely cosmetic. At present, you can just enter the session title into the "Proceedings Title" field, but this is confusing and should ideally be labeled accurately.
Each of these three changes simply involves adding an additional field to the Conference Paper item type--nothing that is already there needs to be deleted or modified in any way.
Ideally, the bibliography call for such a reference would use these fields (CSL fields are in lowercase; punctuation and uppercase letters are shown for ease of display):
author. (issued). title. IN container-author, container-title. genre PRESENTED AT event, publisher-place.
At present, a workaround is possible by using an unused field (such as "Short Title") in place the 'genre' field. For example, corrected formatted references can be made with these fields:
author. (issued). title. IN collection-editor, container-title. title-short PRESENTED AT event, publisher-place.
Thus, while it is technically possible to get the correct formatting for this reference type (which is very common in at least some fields of psychology, if not other sciences), it involves messy workarounds and remembering which incorrect labels correspond to which pieces of information. It seems to me that making this a cleaner, more reliable process would be relatively easy.
[[Edit: After making some test code, I noticed one additional wrinkle. I don't see a way to elegantly make CSL distinguish different types ('genre') and adjust the verb of the 'presented at' text to "conducted" for symposia. At present, I am using the 'call-number' field as a dummy variable--if it has a value, use the short form of 'presented at' (custom set to "conducted at"), if it's blank, use the standard long form ("presented at").]]
A correctly worded APA reference for a symposium is:
Wiernik, B. M. (2013, April). Effects of respondent characteristics on organizational employee sustainability survey responses. In Dilchert, S. & Wiernik, B. M. (Chairs), Practical lessons in survey methods for measuring employee green behaviors. Symposium conducted at the annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Houston, Texas.
To fix this problem, a few simple changes to the "Conference Paper" item type need to be made. These changes have the added advantage of allowing all forms of conference presentations, published, unpublished, poster, symposium, paper, etc., to be recorded using the same "Conference Paper" item type.
Necessary technical change:
1. Add a "Type" or "Session Type" field mapped to CSL 'genre'. This field is used to conditionally format the references for different session types (poster vs paper vs symposium). It would be ignored for conference papers published in proceedings.
Preferred changes:
2. Add a "Chair" subfield to the contributor field mapped to CSL 'container-author'. At present, this can be approximated by using the "Series Editor" field, but this is not ideal and it may be problematic when citing works that are actually part of a series with a series editor (depending on how the coding is implemented for the style).
3. Add a "Session Title" field mapped to CSL 'container-title'. This is purely cosmetic. At present, you can just enter the session title into the "Proceedings Title" field, but this is confusing and should ideally be labeled accurately.
Each of these three changes simply involves adding an additional field to the Conference Paper item type--nothing that is already there needs to be deleted or modified in any way.
Ideally, the bibliography call for such a reference would use these fields (CSL fields are in lowercase; punctuation and uppercase letters are shown for ease of display):
author. (issued). title. IN container-author, container-title. genre PRESENTED AT event, publisher-place.
At present, a workaround is possible by using an unused field (such as "Short Title") in place the 'genre' field. For example, corrected formatted references can be made with these fields:
author. (issued). title. IN collection-editor, container-title. title-short PRESENTED AT event, publisher-place.
Thus, while it is technically possible to get the correct formatting for this reference type (which is very common in at least some fields of psychology, if not other sciences), it involves messy workarounds and remembering which incorrect labels correspond to which pieces of information. It seems to me that making this a cleaner, more reliable process would be relatively easy.
[[Edit: After making some test code, I noticed one additional wrinkle. I don't see a way to elegantly make CSL distinguish different types ('genre') and adjust the verb of the 'presented at' text to "conducted" for symposia. At present, I am using the 'call-number' field as a dummy variable--if it has a value, use the short form of 'presented at' (custom set to "conducted at"), if it's blank, use the standard long form ("presented at").]]
1. already exists
3. We would just map Session title to container-title - in the conference paper item type we'd have two fields mapped to the same item from an item type which is a no go.
2. Is the most tricky one. If we want to get the right label (Chair or Charis) in citations, we need a new CSL contributor type, the label needs to be localized etc. I'm not sure we're willing to go there, at least not unless this is an issue that goes beyond APA. Adding "Chair" in Zotero isn't a big issue, as long as it can be mapped to an existing CSL creator type. I don't see a good candidate. container-author is likely the best.
Also, an additional issue. I don't see a way to elegantly make CSL distinguish different types ('genre') and adjust the verb of the 'presented at' text to "conducted" for symposiums. At present, I am using the 'call-number' field as a dummy variable--if it has a value, use the short form of 'presented at' (custom set to "conducted at"), if it's blank, use the standard long form ("presented at"). Is there currently a better way to handle that?
I'm optimistic about the session to container-title match, that seems like an obvious fit.
Just as a heads-up, it'll still take a fair amount of time until we get the changes in place that will allow us to add fields to item types.