New Entity Type

Keith Ralston

'Book Review' would be a good type to add with its own formatting for data entry, notes, and bibliography.

I have never used a bib management tool that handles these well. I always use reviews in my research. I read everything.

simifilm

I don't really see the point of this. If it's published as an article in a journal or newspaper (which is probably the common scenario), you can just cite it as such. Just use "Review of xxx" as the title of the article.

Tjowens

Yes I don't see what more you need beyond what Journal Article offers. You can even use the field "Reviewed Author" to add the name of the author of the reviewed work.

scot

In the Chicago Manual of Style (both types) and its derivatives (Turabian, SBL), book reviews need handling which cannot be done by Zotero at the moment. In an untitled book review, the footnote should look like this:

[1] Howard M. Teeple, review of A. Robert and A. Feuillet, Introduction to
the New Testament, JBR 34 (1966): 368-70.

Currently the Journal Article item type would put quotes around "Review...Testament".

The short (subsequent) footnote form should look like this:

[2] Teeple, review of Robert and Feuillet, 369.

This would also not be treated correctly by the current allowable fields and CMS style.

In a titled book review you have to have room for the title of the book review, the words "Review of", and the author of the original work, like this:

[3] Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Things That You’re Liable to Read in the Bible”
(review of David Noel Freedman, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary), New York
Times Review of Books,, December 20, 1992, 3.

It's true that conceptually a book review very similar to a journal article, but in the Chicago note family of styles (and APA, I think), they are not treated similarly enough for the 'Journal Article' type to function as-is for book reviews.

Former discussions:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/97/book-reviews-another-item-type/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3403/missing-types-of-object/

This is one area which will be affected when the new (hierarchical, relational...and still distant) data model gets adopted. When that comes in, we will have the (better) option of having an explicit relationship between two works that defines X as review of Y, and then the CSL styles can just do the Right Thing as per the examples above---even automatically handling the difference between titled and untitled reviews.

I know it's important to get the (long term) design right, but in this case, it seems to me that data migration to a future more robust model is actually best served by a distinct "Book Review" item type now. That way, we get the original work's Author and Title in explicit fields (instead of messily within the title field of the review) and when we make the change to a hierarchical data model, the contents of those two extra fields can be automatically moved to a new item, with an explicit 'Review of" relationship with the review item. Presto, automatic migration and everything still works (and you can publicly nix the stopgap 'Book Review' type.

Without a Book Review item, we have broken behavior now (for Chicago anyway styles) AND a harder, more manual data migration then.

P. S. I see the newly added "Reviewed Author" field. I suppose this could even be enough to make untitled reviews work without a separate item type (if you put the reviewed work's title in the review's 'Title' field). Is this the plan? At the moment "Reviewed Author" does nothing in my (default) CMS style.