Conference paper in journal special issue

halfflat

I'd like to create an entry describing an article from the proceedings of a conference, published as a special issue of a journal. I am having trouble finding the appropriate representation: if I use the Conference Paper item type, and use the Series field to represent the journal, the journal title or the journal volume (or both!) is not presented in an exported citation; if I use the Journal Article format, there is no suitable field to store the name of the proceedings.

To be specific, what I would like to represent is an item:

Sunkara, Vikram and Markus Hegland, 2011: Parallelising the finite state projection method. Proceedings of the 15th Biennial Computational Techniques and Applications Conference, CTAC-2010. ANZIAM Journal 52 (electronic supplement), C853–C865.

Any advice is welcome!

bwiernik

Use the Journal Article type if it's published in a journal. The "Series" or "Series Title" fields are generally used for things like special issue or special section titles.

bwiernik

And whether this field shows up in the bibliography depends on the citation style. What style are you using?

adamsmith

alternate workaround might be to just throw it all into the journal title field.

halfflat

Thanks for the suggestions!

One of the needs from this collection is to export to BibTeX; Series Title, for example, is omitted from the entry.

It is also omitted from other styles, such as 'Nature'. Chicago style puts the volume number after the series title, which is incorrect.

Apart from the semantic mismatch — the series tile should refer to the journal as a whole, rather than a particular issue — it isn't working practically. The Series Title approach doesn't appear to be a good solution.

Putting the special issue text into the journal title field has a similar problem with volume number placement in exported citations, and of course is also a semantic mismatch: ideally articles from the same journal would have the same text in the journal field in their entry.

noksagt

Where would you put this information in a BibTeX entry? I can't think of any BibTeX style that has this concept of a special section or special issue either.

halfflat

Strictly speaking, I am using BibLaTeX rather than BibTeX. The relevant entry field is "issuetitle", and it Does The Right Thing in the standard biblography styles.

adamsmith

hence "workaround" not "solution". That's the best we can currently do.

zuphilip

The above mentioned article is in the electronic supplement of vol 52 of the journal, more exactly it is in the proceeding part (first) of the electronic supplement.

Sometimes libraries are cataloguing subseries of journals also as a new record, e.g. (look for the "Beil. zu" = supplement to):
http://dispatch.opac.dnb.de/DB=1.1/SET=6/TTL=64/CLK?IKT=12&TRM=011218878

Thus, it is also from a semantical point of view possible to speak of this (sub)journal. Anyway don't forget to include the doi in your reference.

halfflat

Any way for us to work towards an actual solution?

We're evaluating Zotero for collaborative work on an annotated bibliography, and if fixing something like this isn't a major undertaking, we're willing to get our hands dirty, so to speak, and contribute.

noksagt

The ideal solution may require a new zotero field (issue-title), as that is semantically distinct from series-title and series-text (note well, though, that NIH's use of these terms is for a 'section' within a journal, rather than the collection of journals interpretation of halfflat). This would not be an easy fix to contribute.

Further, CSL doesn't yet have a distinct place for each of these (though there is talk of adding a volume title and issue title). That makes the ideal fix that much more difficult for you.

For now, the best CSL variable is collection-title. Both of Zotero's series fields are mapped to it. If a CSL-based style you wish to use doesn't display the entered series information and the presentation of the information would be the same for series-title and issue-title (such as, perhaps, Nature), a good solution would be to modify the CSL style. This should be easy.

As I note, BibTeX has no such convention. However, we have a separate BibLaTeX style. Because we don't have an issue-title and they don't have a series-title, a good solution is to just add that mapping. That's also easy.

halfflat

Thanks for the reference for the use of series-title to refer to series of articles, as opposed to a series of a journal — I was unfamiliar with it. (Only had come across Journal of Foo Studies, New Series sort of examples in the past.)

Collection-title does indeed sound like a good implementation method for the functionality, based on what you have described. If we commit to using Zotero for this project, we'll see if we can contribute the appropriate mapping.

bwiernik

Updates to item fields are planned for Zotero 4.2. One of the changes that will almost certainly come is a "Volume/Issue Title" field. Right now, these changes are waiting on a major update of the Zotero database structure and syncing system, which has been progressing steadily.

The Series, Series Title, and Series Text fields are confusing. Dan describes the intent behind them here. Basically, Series was meant to refer to the Series in which an issue appears, whereas Series Title referred to the section within an issue where an article appeared. Series Title should probably have been called Section Title.

Anyway, at present, your best solutions are to just include all of the special issue information in the Publication field or to use the Series or Series Title fields and adjust your style accordingly to use them.