Correct fields for entering a journal series

dunning

Various journals restart their volume numbering periodically with a new series, leading to the following citations (see Chicago, §14.195):

• R.W. Hunt, "English Learning in the Late Twelfth Century", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 19 (1936): 19–42, doi:10.2307/3678685.


• N.R. Ker, "Sir John Prise", The Library, 5th ser., 10, no. 1 (March 1955): 1–24, doi:10.1093/library/s5-X.1.1.

Unfortunately, this information does not import properly from the online versions of either of these examples. Is there a recommended way of entering these in Zotero? There are 'series', 'series title', and 'series text' fields for a journal article: it's not clear to me whether any of these are intended for this purpose, nor do they give the expected results if I try to use them. If I put '5' in for the series field in the second example above (which is what I would ideally like to be able to do, with CSL generating the appropriate ordinal and abbreviation according to the style, as it does for editions), I get the following using Chicago:

N.R. Ker, ‘Sir John Prise’, The Library 10, no. 1, 5 (March 1955): 1–24, doi:10.1093/library/s5-X.1.1.

It also doesn't work to put '5th ser., 10' in the volume field, because Chicago specifies a comma between the journal title and the series. On the other hand, if I use the MHRA style, it does put the 'series' field in the right place for this purpose (assuming I enter '5th ser.' or 'n.s.' in full).

adamsmith

series and series title need to get merged or fixed, but they both point to the same CSL field. Using the series field is the right way to go, but you will need to include the literal string you want, CSL doesn't exact numbers from that variable.
We can then look at fixing CMoS, though it won't happen super quickly.

dunning

Thanks for the clarification! I see now that merging these fields has been discussed for a few years. It could actually be useful to have both 'series' and 'series text' (or something like that) in the case of books, where you can get horrible things like this:

Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Anthony Wood, Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, 3rd ser., 5 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2002).

You can achieve that by manually placing the comma after the series title in Zotero; I'm not sure if there's a better solution. Similarly, there's another example in Chicago at 14.128 of a book with a volume and number.

For the placement of the journal series, I would fix the Chicago style definition myself, but I don't want to break it for someone else; does the series designation after the volume and number have some other application? (I've already ruled out special issues, supplements, articles published in instalments, and place where journal is published.)

dunning

There's one other wrinkle, which also affects MHRA: "ser." and "n.s." are being capitalized when placed in the series field, coming out as "Ser." and "N.s.".

adamsmith

we can probably do w/o title-casing collection-title for periodicals. We should leave title-casing for book series in place though.
There is a collection-number variable that corresponds to the "Series Number" field for books, though I've always interpreted that as number _in_ a series, not the number of the series itself.

I don't have any objections against moving the collection-title for journals and I don't see what it could break. You'll need to take care to not affect other item types, though. Not having looked at the style my guess would be that this was never intended for periodicals.

dunning

Would it perhaps be cleaner to add these two abbreviations to the capitalization exceptions list?

I assume that 'collection-number' corresponds what is displayed as 'Series Number' within Zotero. The issue is that you would not normally have a comma between the series title and series number within Chicago style (though there is in MHRA and some other styles), but you do need one if there is also a volume or series number. I've been putting "Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications," in the series title (i.e. with the comma) and "3rd ser., 5" as the number, but then I end up with two commas when I cite that book in an MHRA-formatted paper.

adamsmith

Would it perhaps be cleaner to add these two abbreviations to the capitalization exceptions list?

no, messing with the capitalization rules is generally not a great idea - who knows if people may want "Ser. in some place.

but you do need one if there is also a volume or series number. I've been putting "Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications,"

I'm not sure I follow this, I find the CMoS examples a bit terse on this and in my discipline we don't have journal series, so could you help me with an example?
Generally, if there is a consistent rule of the type - "add a comma if there is also a volume" - it can be implemented in CSL.

dunning

I'll see what I can do with getting collection-title to print in the right spot for journal articles, then.

The other example I've pulled up is only an issue with books. Normally in Chicago, when you have a series, there is no space between the series identifier and the number, such as:

Willoughby, James M.W., ed. The Libraries of Collegiate Churches. Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 15. London: British Library in association with the British Academy, 2013.

In MHRA, this would be:

Willoughby, James M.W., ed., The Libraries of Collegiate Churches, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 15 (London: British Library in association with the British Academy, 2013)

The existing setup works just fine for this. If you need more information than a simple number within the series, however, you need a comma after the series title (according to the examples in §14.132), as here:

Vaughan, Richard. Matthew Paris. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 2nd ser., 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.

The trouble here is that I can't think of any way to input the information so that it comes out properly in both MHRA and Chicago, since there are only two fields to work with. I also can't think of a way of changing the Chicago CSL files on this point in such a way that wouldn't break other ways of using the field. Do you have any ideas on this?

adamsmith

If the rule is indeed" If you need more information than a simple number within the series, however, you need a comma after the series title"
one could test for
<if is-numeric="collection-number">
and add the comma delimiter if it's not. We already test for is-numeric for editions.
The question is if that's the right rule and if it's going to get us into trouble, e.g., with series numbers in Roman numerals (VII)

dunning

I thought of that, but it could cause problems in cases where there is more than one series. For example:

Rossana Guglielmetti, La tradizione manoscritta dei commenti latini al Cantico dei cantici (origini–XII secolo): Repertorio dei codici contenenti testi inediti o editi solo nella «Patrologia latina», Millennio Medievale 63; Strumenti e studi, n.s., 14 (Florence: SISMEL edizioni del Galluzzo edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006).

adamsmith

if you put "n.s., 14" into "Series Number" is numeric would still evaluate to false (just like "3rd rev. edition" does). So that would work, I think.

dunning

Right, I hadn't thought of that. (I had been putting 'Millennio Medievale' into the title and '63; Strumenti e studi, n.s., 14' into the series number.) The question is whether this is going to mess other people up, if someone else used a similar hack. But it would be really nice if this could work.

adamsmith

I'm OK with that. It's sufficiently rare that I'm fine with inconveniencing the very, very few users who have a system set up for this.

dunning

Awesome. I have a lot of things like this in my library, and for me it certainly fixes more things than it breaks, so hopefully it's the same for others.

I've almost got the above changes working in Chicago; I'm just trying to figure out the most elegant way of doing it. I'll submit it in the next day or two.

nschneid

What is the best way to handle journals that have a title associated with each volume (e.g., here)? Should the volume-specific title go in one of the series fields?

adamsmith

we don't have a good way of doing this (we'd need a new CSL variable, something like volume-title and/or issue-title
See here for a more general perspective
https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/issues/111

Specifically for your example, though, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to cite these as conference papers - that seems a much better description of what those are, including editors and all.

nschneid

OK, yes, volume-title would be more appropriate.

I figured it should be cited as a journal rather than a conference paper because it has an ISSN, not an ISBN, and because the publication date is two years later than the date of the conference.

adamsmith

the ISSN isn't uncommon for conference paper and a later date than the conference itself is normal (we also need separate dates for conference and publication, which aren't currently available).

nschneid

"the ISSN isn't uncommon for conference paper": Interesting, but the conference paper item type only supports ISBN at present.

"we also need separate dates for conference and publication": This would be great. Also location of conference vs. place of publication?

adamsmith

"we also need separate dates for conference and publication": This would be great. Also location of conference vs. place of publication?

yup. Both of those already exist in CSL (event-place and event-date) so those are just a Zotero question.

adamsmith

dunning's changes are now life for the full note version of the style, others to follow eventually.
The updated version will appear on the repository within 30mins (check the timestamp). Update your copy of the style by clicking "Update Now" in the General tab of the Zotero preferences.

Styles also update automatically within 24hs for Zotero 4.0+
In an existing document, you may have to switch to a different style and back for the changes to take effect once the style is updated.

nickbart

If I put '5' in for the series field in the second example above (which is what I would ideally like to be able to do, with CSL generating the appropriate ordinal and abbreviation according to the style, as it does for editions)

I like this idea, and in fact this is exactly what biblatex does if the series field of an article contains a number only.

Any chance this could be implemented in CSL? I don't see problems, since this is indeed the same thing CSL already does for editions. A new localization term for "series" would have to be introduced, of course.

Ideally, CSL would also handle both style-specific and localized variants of terms like "old series" and "new series" ("n. s." vs. "new ser." or other forms; "nouv. ser.", "N. F."). I realize, though, that this is only going to be possible once CSL is able to compare variable content.

nickbart

I have been using this patch for a while now without problems:--- chicago-author-date.csl 2014-05-23 03:53:00.000000000 +0100
+++ chicago-author-date-journal-series.csl 2014-07-05 17:35:23.000000000 +0100
@@ -432,8 +432,15 @@
<choose>
<if type="article-journal">
<group delimiter=" ">
- <text variable="collection-title"/>
- <text variable="collection-number"/>
+ <choose>
+ <if is-numeric="collection-title">
+ <number variable="collection-title" form="ordinal" suffix=" ser." />
+ </if>
+ <else>
+ <text variable="collection-title" />
+ </else>
+ </choose>
+ <text variable="collection-number" />
</group>
</if>
</choose>


Are you interested in using this for the official chicago-author-date.csl? If so, would you prefer a pull request?

The " ser." is hardcoded for now. A cleaner solution would be to introduce a CSL term for "series".

adamsmith

thanks. Unfortunately we can't do this without a CSL change/update since only variables designated as number variables can be called with cs:number
http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#number
and
http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#number-variables

nickbart

I see. Would such a CSL change/update be difficult? Has this been proposed before? If not, should I? Would https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/issues be the right place?

Or - to air a different idea - we could export Zotero's "Series Title" box of the "Journal Article" type only (the only series box that is exported at all, "Series" and "Series Text" apparently aren't) to "collection-number" instead.

This already is a number variable, but could also hold strings such as "new series", "new ser.", or "n.s." etc.

pandoc, when importing from a biblatex "series" field in an @article or @periodical entry, could map this to collection-number as well.

adamsmith

I mentioned this on the pandoc issue tracker -- please bring this up on xbiblio first. We'd like to hash out a solution there, first and then just put in on the issue tracker when it's agreed on.