Difficulty Formatting Complex Book Editions in Bibliography

patrickgwelch

Hello, I am running Zotero V1.5-sync3.5 on Ubuntu 8.10 and using open office 3.0 with the Zotero openoffice integration 2.0a2 plugin.

I have the APA DSM-IV-TR in my zotero library properly entered as a book. The information/meta-data for the 'Edition' tag is set to "4th ed., text revision; DSM-IV-TR"
which is of course a bigger mess than the traditional "4th ed." that a book would have.

My problem is that my bibliography that the zotero openoffice integration plugin creates (and this problem is replicated by right clickin in zotero and exporting a bibliography from the item) will only print:

American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.


I don't know if Zotero is trying to be helpful by automatically truncating anything after the 'ed.' but there are occasions when one wants that to be different.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Pat

Rintze

Which style are you using?

patrickgwelch

oops, forgot to include that :P

I'm using APA style (american psychological association)

Thanks,

Pat

Rintze

Apparently, when the edition field starts with a number ("4" in this case), that number is used for the value of edition, and the rest is discarded. I'm not sure you can do anything to circumvent this 'intelligent behavior' of Zotero (maybe support for an escape character could be introduced to turn off this behavior?).

patrickgwelch

Thanks for your feedback and help Rintze, maybe a future version of Zotero (or the plugin) will allow for this function (an escape character, like you suggest, or even turning the field into a string instead of an integer).

Cheers,

Pat

dstillman

The current behavior allows for the format of the field (ordinal, etc.) to be determined by the style, account for different bibliography locales, etc. It only applies to Edition fields that begin with integers—when the Edition field begins with a letter (e.g., "Revised Edition"), the string is passed through as is.

I'm not sure what the best solution here is. Perhaps enclosing the string in quotes, such that "4th Edition, text revision" would be passed through as is (without the quotes)? Of course, it would be passed through that way for all styles.

An alternative would be some way to enter a string to be appended to the end, perhaps with something similar to the two-field creator mode. In that case, the beginning would be inserted according to the style but ", text revision; DSM-IV-TR" would be appended to it. The comma might be automatic.

patrickgwelch

Hi Dan, sorry for the delayed reply. Both of those solutions sound promising. I wasn't sure if either of them would work currently, so I tried them - but alas, nothing yet.

Perhaps a future version of Zotero/Open Office plugin/APA style plugin will address this issue. If I only had some programming skills myself I would get in there and get my hands dirty (maybe a near future learning opportunity).

Thank you very much Dan and Rintze for both of your helpful and informative feedback

Pat

Rintze

Dan just introduced support for quotes as escape characters. This change will probably make it to the next Sync Preview release.

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5080/isphrase-condition/#Item_16
https://www.zotero.org/trac/changeset/3905

patrickgwelch

Thats awesome Dan and Rintze, thanks for being responsive to users comments. Yet another reasons why Zotero and it's community bests all the corporate challengers (goodbye forever endnote/refworks/etc... :P).

Cheers,

Pat