Interviews in Book form

elotroalex

Most of the interviews I work with are published in book form. The problem right now is that if I choose to index them as books, I don't have an option to mark the interviewer or the person interviewed. If I index them as interviews, then many of the fields I need for my citation are not available (i.e. place, publisher, isbn, etc.).

I can see two possible solutions: one would be adding the missing fields to the 'interview' form, which I cannot do manually since I am not a developer; or two, add the option to add interviewer to the creator drop-down menu under the 'book' form. Since I also have the same problem with published dissertations, a general solution would really help.

Short of Zotero implementing the change for future versions, can anyone help me add the code to my personal Zotero that would allow me add fields to current items without damaging the database? Is that even possible? Please be gentle with me. I am a new to this whole thing and have slept little for the past couple of days transferring all my text-based biblios to the Zotero interface.

dougsingsen

I see that there weren't any responses to this thread from nearly two years ago. I'm having the same problem right now, and I think this would be an excellent addition to the next update of Zotero.

adamsmith

unlikely that something is going to move that fast, but for a start, how would such a citation look in a common citation style?

dougsingsen

No prob on the speed of implementation. I have no idea how these things work. I'd just like to see it at some point.

Note in Chicago Manual of Style format:

Judith Butler, "Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resignification," interview by Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham, Journal of Advanced Composition, 20 (Fall 2000): 733.

alexuw

Book reviews present similar problems and have been discussed a lot here. I generally hack around it by embedding extra information in the title, in brackets. Following the example above, I'd make this as a journal article with the title

Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resignification [interview by Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham]

The citation produced is not correct, but at least has the information, more or less in the right order. If you want it precisely correct you can edit it manually. Also I would enter the interviewers names as "contributors" so the item will show up in searches. This approach is less than ideal but workable.

dougsingsen

That's not a bad workaround, but having a Published Interview item type would still be a valuable addition. Manual workarounds like this are problematic because 1) they require extra effort on the user's part, and 2) once you've manually changed the citation, it no longer can be updated or modified using Zotero's built-in functions. Both of these problems detract from the convenience of using Zotero, which is one of its main attractions.

dougsingsen

Also, as alexuw notes, it's not quite the correct format. I'm working on my dissertation right now, which has a huge number of endnotes that absolutely have to be in the exact right format, which means that I have to fix all of them manually, which is a pain in the ass.

adamsmith

Another alternative would be to slightly change the style and use the "series" or "series title" field - not ideal, but might work. (can be called with "collection-title") - also the "extra" field (called by "note") would be an option.
My immediate favorite in this case would be to include a "type" field for journal items, book sections, adn books (can be called with "genre") - that would allow citations like this easily and without any significant changes to Zotero and/or csl. This is in line with the broader idea to allow more (standardized) fields in Zotero items (Bruce has called for that, too).

Probably still a good idea to think about an additional item type in the long run.

olaf

Are there any news on this problem? I have similar problems with adding published interviews to my zotero database.
Would it be that much trouble to allow insert "Interviewer" and "Interviewed" as contributor type for entry-type journal article, book, et.al. as it is allowed for the entry-type interviews?

bwiernik

Any changes to item types/fields has been waiting on the Zotero 5.0 update. It doesn't look like the precise formatting needs for interviews published in journal articles and/or books have been explicitly laid out defined. It would be really helpful for someone who actually references these types of items to give a variety of examples and outline exactly what fields are needed.

The cleanest solution would probably be adding the interviewer creator type to the Journal Article and Book Section item types. An alternative that might be more intuitive would be to add the necessary publication fields to the Interview item types, but that could be messy to accommodate both journal-like and book-like publications.

For the present, you can get the interview type on any item type by entering the data into the Extra field in this format:
{:interviewer: Last | First }

You can then add the correct formatting for interviewers to your CSL citation style. Most of the official CSL styles don't currently handle interviews/interviewers at all, but some do.