Upgrade StorageDifference between pagination by issue and by year
Hello,
I'm aware that certain styles require (e.g. APA, DGP) the distinction between pagination by issue and by year. This is due to the citation requirement to only add the issue when the pagination is by issue and not by year. It would be great if I could define within zotero which journals have a pagination by issue and which by year. This would avoid having to manually add or delete the issue for zotero journal entries.
I very much hope that it is possible to implement this feature request.
Many thanks!
I'm aware that certain styles require (e.g. APA, DGP) the distinction between pagination by issue and by year. This is due to the citation requirement to only add the issue when the pagination is by issue and not by year. It would be great if I could define within zotero which journals have a pagination by issue and which by year. This would avoid having to manually add or delete the issue for zotero journal entries.
I very much hope that it is possible to implement this feature request.
Many thanks!
I suppose we could add a checkbox for every single journal article, but a) that's really ugly and b) it requires manually editing every single article, which is really unsatisfactory.
I'd really like a better solution on this.
I don't know what Endnote or RefWorks do, though it looks like they don't really handle it, either: http://community.thomsonreuters.com/t5/EndNote-How-To/APA-6th-edition-and-issue-numbers/td-p/12272
(if Endnote doesn't, it's pretty safe to say, neither does RefWorks)
BibLaTeX I think has some type of toggle for it (but they also don't have a GUI, nor are their terribly concerned about things working automatically).
"I have implemented my solution. It turns out that in fact Custom 1 and Custom 2 had already been renamed for some reason, so I changed the name of Custom 8 to “IssueThis”, and changed the bibliography template in the APA 6th format to use IssueThis instead of Issue. Now by default, no issue numbers are inserted into the bibliography. However, if I need to have an issue number put out for a certain reference, I simply copy the contents of the Issue field into the IssueThis field, and all is good."
And it's really not a "solution," it's a hack that requires users to hack data entry and styles.
Is there a CSL variable that we could utilize for this toggle? (e.g. scale or version) Then, if someone really wants to go through the trouble of figuring out which journals are paginated in which way, they can toggle it via extra field (using MLZ syntax and hopefully copy-paste).
Frank could also build a hack into the processor that would remove issue number if the toggle was present. This way the official style wouldn't have to be hacked up. Could even use a more relevantly named CSL variable (e.g. continuous-pagination or something shorter)
- Having an issue number makes it much easier to find an article in print or online than having to guess at which issue encompasses the page range.
I received a reply that stated that an uncluttered bibliography is their goal. I'll try to find the exact wording of the next part of this reply because it is way-crazy. The service representative suggested that when it was necessary to find the actual article that task would normally be passed along to an assistant(!).
- The APA's own bibliographic services (PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES) provide the journal issue number in their metadata and do not provide any indication when the issue number for a journal should be dropped when the article is cited.
The reply to this was that PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES are operated out of a different office with difference policies. The PsycInfo metadata is leased to contractors that want the issue number information.
As to my question about an indicator of when the issue number of a PsycINFO article should be dropped; the service rep said that the pagination/issue information should be collected when the actual article is found. It should not be the APA's responsibility to maintain a listing of journals with issue pagination versus volume pagination. Anyway, they said, sometimes the format of the journal can change over its lifetime.
The bizarreness of the letter was such that I made photocopies and circulated them to colleagues and acquaintances. Now, after two office moves, I cannot seem to find where I filed it.
Not following the rule when submitting a paper to a professor or a manuscript to a journal could carry consequences with a detail oriented professor or reviewer. This absurd rule must be changed.
CSL-wise, having a continuous-pagination variable at the item level that can be true or false would probably be the easiest solution, but we should check this with xbiblio before suggesting to Frank to put this in, even as a hack.
The additional aspect of this is that, at least at the undergraduate and masters level, there appears to be a strong correlation between faculty requiring APA and faculty caring about details of citation styles. At least in the US, the only cases I know of people receiving lower grades because of formatting errors in citation styles are APA.
In terms of accommodating the rule with a hack, the headache is that by-issue pagination is so rare that it would usually amount to every journal article item in a user's library having the toggle in the Extra field. There is no comprehensive list of journals with their pagination indicated, but here is a list with a fair number. Of the 618 journals listed, 59 are paginated by issue. If anything, a processor hack should probably delete the issue number of all journal items unless the toggle is present.
(Btw, yes, I'm a psychology/management researcher)
I'd still like a solution that requires less human interaction, though, but I don't see how we'd do that short of a list/database.
Thinking about this, we could consider collecting that on the CSL side together with citation styles for journals. We're already collecting a pretty thorough set of journal metadata. Rintze, thoughts on that?
I can attest to that from the anger fumed or tears shed by students who attended my how not to plagiarize and how to use Zotero seminars. I have talked with my colleagues to no avail. They use the citation details as a gauge of the student's ability to follow detailed instructions. One actually said that the page margins and citation formatting was as important as the paper's content when assessing undergrad and masters students' work quality.
I must add that I warned the seminar attendees about the eccentricities of certain professors. Also I warned that some of the faculty require issue numbers despite the APA rules. [edit] I _strongly_ recommend(ed) that students not discard the issue information in their databases.
Until we find a way to filter out the autocratic nincompoop professors, or eliminate nonsense citation rules; this issue continues to be non-trivial.
OK, I'll stand down from my rant platform.
I still stand by my original statement that the rule should be ignored by default (sucks for the students, but if their professors actually want them to learn APA by heart, the students should be proof reading the bibliography anyway). Assuming we go with some sort of toggle (name to be decided), I guess we would go with a hidden pref that would enable the hack and disable issue numbers for all items. It would then re-enable them depending on the toggle. This would also have to be citation style-specific... sigh.
So basically, either it's an ugly hack in the processor, or CSL needs an official mechanism. One I don't like on principle, the other will take a long time to implement.
CSL has a variable by-issue-pagination that can be true or false. We're going to default this to false.
In Zotero, there's a small toggle, accessible via GUI but as unobtrusively as possible (e.g. right click on page numbers or so) to toggle this.
In addition, Zotero automatically checks journal names against a database to toggle said variable for all items in the database.
If CSL agrees to this in general, Frank could probably put this in the processor very easily and the style modifications would be 4 lines of code and could, on the Zotero side, be hacked via the extra field, which could later be migrated.
I'm not unsympathetic to aurimas's more political approach to this, but from a marketing perspective, this is one of the first things potential new users experience in interacting with Zotero (and other CSL products) and it's be nice to make that interaction positive. From a political perspective, there shouldn't be more than 4 citations styles overall and the whole point of CSL is to help people deal with the insanity that exists in the world of referencing.
It seems like a major headache for very little practical gain. Are there any non-APA derived styles that use this rule? I'll join the chorus to say that the rule doesn't make any sense to me.
There is a lot of this kind of thing in legal referencing, and I've played with various solutions in MLZ. Abusing the Magazine Article type for it, mentioned by Brenton, was a poor idea that will be decommissioned in the next (root-and-branch) iteration of the MLZ styles.
The Bluebook follows the APA rule in the 19th edition. Unless the editors are able to come up with something worse, we can expect it to feature in the 20th (due out during the summer - I don't know about you guys, but I am just bursting with anticipation). Apart from that, under legal styles generally, the jurisdiction must be suppressed in cites to domestic material, but included in foreign cites; and the court is omitted when judgments are cited to a reporter (such as U.S., L.Ed., Wis., etc.) that is dedicated to that particular court. The Bluebook goes the world one better, of course - IIRC if the court name is included in the cite "Supreme Court" is abbreviated as "S.Ct." for national-level jurisdictions, but as "Sup. Ct." for U.S. state-level courts.
To cope with all of this wonderful variety, the processor has a hook for field suppression, which is used by the Abbreviation Filter (AFZ). [1] Placing control over these choices in a middle layer between Zotero/MLZ and the processor relieves CSL and the item database of dealing with them, and allows some UI to be spliced in to provide user control.
The user interface for suppressing variables in AFZ is currently quite ghastly, expressed as leading markup in the abbreviation itself (i.e. "!jurisdiction,authority>>>U.S."). AFZ was hacked together in too much haste quite awhile ago, but I have been cleaning it up by degrees over the past year, and it's now quite usable. It's still very rough in Zotero-terms, but it might be worth playing around with as a worked example that attempts to balance data-driven automation and user control, along the lines described by Sebastian.
One thing to keep in mind is that some journals have changed their policy over time, some even more than once, e.g, from by-volume to by-issue and back (e.g., Journal of Teacher Education, according to the list mentioned above), so a Zotero list will have to keep track of time-related information, too.
Out of curiosity, but also with a view to implementing this mechanism in pandoc-citeproc, a few questions: Where does the processor retrieve the abbreviation list from? Is there a common repository? What’s the format of the ‘pagination-by-issue’ flag (if that's how it works), and how can time-related information be included?
There isn't a toggle for pagination by issue per se, but an abbreviation entry can trigger suppression of selected fields from subsequent output. So we can accomplish the same effect by suppressing the issue field when the abbreviated journal name is rendered. (If the journal name is spelled out in full, you would be out of luck.)
I still think what bwiernik suggests is generally a promising avenue, but unfortunately it's not going to work with existing tools.