Adaptation of style - necessity for new publication type?

Hi,

I am currently trying to get a good citation style (only citation, not bibliography for the moment) for German law magazines. There is a CSL for this purpose availabe (Juristische Zitierweise (Stüber) (German)) which is a good starting point. However, I have one issue and I haven't found a solution to it yet.

As far as I understand it, there are two publication types that relate to a book: book (as "the whole book") and "inbook" (as "chapter of a book), which can have a different author than the "book".

In German legal citation styles, we differentiate further (this is also explained in German in the PDF which is linked in the style www.niederle-media.de/Zitieren.pdf):

1. There are books (we also call "monographies") with one or a set of fixed authors.
Citation would be (following the citation as in the above style "Stüber"):

<author in italic>, <title>, <page(s)>

e.g.:

Schoch, Vorläufiger Rechtsschutz, S. 412

This would translate into "book" in Zotero. So, I would have one entry of type book in my Zotero database.

2. Then there are books where one or more authors will be responsible only for one or more chapters in that book, which has a title and a separate chapter title. Additionally, there is an editor (who may be author for several chapters as well).

Citation would be
<author in italic>, in: <editor>, <title of book>, <locator/page(s)>

e.g.:
Knemeyer, in: von Mutius, FG für von Unruh, 209

As far as I understand, for such a citation, I would create an entry of type "inbook" for that separate chapter (and maybe every chapter in the book I want to cite).

3. Now, there is a third category which we call "commentaries" or "handbooks". These are books that have (named) authors/editors and a book title on the one hand.

However, there are usually a lot of authors who write on only small parts of the book. An example would be a commentary on a special Legal Act. Let's say, the legal act has a few hundred paragraphs, then there may be 50+ authors. And the "chapter" one author writes on, does usually not have a separate title, it is just called "Chapter 4" or "§ 33" and is used only in the locator part.

Citation would therefore be:

<author of part cited in italic>, in: <author of book - not in italic>, <title of book>, <locator>
e.g.
Cramer/Sternberg-Lieben, in: Schönke/Schröder, StGB, § 323c Rn. 5
or
Soerup, in: Heun, HdB TK-Recht, Kap. 7 Rn. 23

As you may imagine, it does not help to add every chapter or paragraph to the Zotero database, one entry should be enough.



Now, do you see any way to differentiate using the publication types Zotero offers?
I could imagine just using "book" for the third category and adding the <author of part cited in italic> using the suffix (which is usually not italic). However, since the book-author for the type "book" is in italic, and the suffix is not, I would have to manually correct the formatting to non-italic, which I would like to avoid.

And I do not want to change the formatting for all books, because there is still category 1 above, where author in italic is just right...

Thank you for any hints and suggestions!
  • I'm not quite sure why you couldn't just use chapter? Is it just that you'd have to add an entry for every chapter? But that still seems like the cleanest solution, no?

    Alternatively, you can always use unused item types--I've seen people use entry-dictionary and/or entry-encyclopedia for law styles in the past.

    (Btw. note that "inbook" is bibtex terminology. This is Book Section in Zotero and "chapter" in CSL)
  • Thank you very much! I had not thought of using an unused type... That should already help me.
  • There is a section in the Stüber's style for entry-encyclopedia of the form:

    [author], [title], [edition] [publisher-place] [publicaiton-year] (Zit.: [editor]/Bearbeiter, in: [title-short] ).

    I agree with adamsmith, that you should try to use individual entries for all individual contributions in commentaries or handbooks. Maybe also simply (book)chapters could fit.

    Maybe the question here is more what is an individual entry and what can be handled with a locator. Let us try to look at an example: https://beck-online.beck.de/default.aspx?typ=reference&y=400&auflagenorm=1&w=MuekoStGB_1_Band4&name=buchueber_5

    I would try to save this as chapter with:
    * author = Wohlers
    * title = StGB § 263a Computerbetrug
    * booktitle = Münchener Kommentar zum StGB
    * year = 2006
    and a concrete citation (footnote style) could then be something like Wohlers 2006: StGB § 263a Computerbetrug, in: Münchener Kommentar zum StGB, Rn. 11

    What do you think? Please let me know whether I understand your question correctly.
  • Thank you for your answer.

    So far, I had disregarded the Stüber's style encyclopedia-entry because I had not thought of using an unused publication type.

    I am not quite happy with the solution of adding one entry for each author in such a book, since it is a lot of work for the user of Zotero on the one hand (which can be (or already is?) reduced by a corresponding translator), but if I want to use a bibliography in the end, this may pose a problem. Or is there a solution how to "group" Zotero entries, so that instead of having e.g. ten entries of "Münchener Kommentar zum StGB" with 3 different authors show up in the bibliography as only one entry with the editors?

    As an alternative, I think Stüber's style entry-encyclopedia is a good starting point. The Word-Zotero-Plugin allows for entering a suffix and a prefix (which are independent of suffix/prefix used in the CSL definition as far as I understand it). Thus, I could use the following style:

    <prefix italic>, in: <editor non-italic>, <title>, <edition>. Aufl., <year>, <suffix>.

    Now, I would only have to find out the variable used for the suffix in CSL.

    What do you think?
  • Sorry, even better would be:

    <prefix from plugin italic>, in: <editor non-italic>, <title short>, <edition>. Aufl., <year>, <locator from plugin>
  • So, it should be in the CSL of Stüber:

    <else-if type="entry-encyclopedia">
    <text variable="prefix" font-style="italic"/>
    <text value=", "/>
    <text value="in: "/>
    <text macro="author-journal" suffix=", "/>
    <text variable="title" suffix=", " form="short"/>
    <text variable="edition" suffix=". Aufl. "/>
    <text macro="journalname-year" suffix=", "/>
    <text variable="locator"/>
    </else-if>

    Where 'variable="prefix"' has to be replaced by the correct variable name...
  • adding one entry for each author in such a book [...] is a lot of work for the user of Zotero
    That might be true. But (at least as far as) the authors are different betweent different parts and you want to show the authors in the bibliography, I don't see any other solution. E.g. from above for the §263-part we have the author "Hefendehl" which is different from the author of §263a-part.

    You could manually dublicate an entry and adjust it then accordingly and we might also improve the beck-online translator for the automatic saving.

    By editing the bibliography you could also delete the individual entries and add just on for the whole book.
    As an alternative, [t]he Word-Zotero-Plugin allows for entering a suffix and a prefix
    I am not sure if you can alter the prefix entered in Word by CSL. But you can enter something like that as prefix:

    <i>Wohlers </i>

    The italics html tags should be rendered then correctly in Word.

    @adamsmith, @fbennett: What are your opinions or experiences?
  • Thank you. I just found out that you can use <i>prefix</i> (from here: https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage). I have not found any way in the CSL to format prefix and suffix though.

    Just to be clear: In works such as the above mentioned commentary "Münchener Kommentar zum StGB", not every author of every paragraph should appear in the bibliography. The opposite is the case: Only the editors should appear in the bibliography in the one entry for the work. The different authors of the paragraphs only appear in the citation itself.

    It should read in the bibliography "Joecks, Wolfgang / Miebach, Klaus, Münchener Kommentar zum StGB, 2. Aufl. 2006" or something alike, depending on the style required.
    Ideally, if the work has different volumes such as in the example, and the different volumes are of the same year, still even only one entry should show in the bibliography...
  • Correct, prefixes cannot be formatted via CSL (technically, prefixes aren't even a feature of CSL, they're just a very common feature of CSL implementations).
  • Has anyone found a solution to the problem of commantaries, as @Blackhole1 describes it? That when you enter a paragraph of a commentary as an encyclopedia entry, only one publication appears in the bibliography with the editors (not the authors)?
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