"Personal communication" as entry for new item

schneede
I would have liked to have "Personal communication" as an entry for a new reference.
Now, the closest I come is "Interview", but I would have liked automated generation of the name of the person I communicated with, the affiliation of the person, the date of communication and that "personal communication" pops up in the bibliography.

Regards,

Jörn Schneede
Umeå
Sweden
  • georgedarroch
    I'd like to strongly second that.
  • ben58
    Me too: in natural sciences at least, "Personal communication" is a quite common reference type.
  • bdarcus
    Well, the problem is Zotero does have some specific personal communication document types (email, letter, etc.), but no generic catchall, and no type for non-document communications. Simply adding a new type without broader thought of how it fits into the existing scheme isn't the best approach.
  • ben58
    edited September 27, 2009
    no type for non-document communications
    So, if I had a number of discussions with a colleague and want to properly cite the source as "Personal communication" - what should I do?

    Another not that uncommon reference type is "Unpublished result".
  • bdarcus
    If you read through the history of this forum, you'll see me previously explaining that a policy of simply adding types ad hoc is a really bad idea for the simple fact that what people consider important varies a lot depending where you are. If we added types like "unpublished result" and opened the floodgates, we could easily end up with 100 or more different types. That's not good design.

    So ask yourself, what is an "unpublished result"? What properties would describe it? Does an existing type like "Manuscript" contain those properties?
  • ben58
    Does an existing type like "Manuscript" contain those properties?
    No, in natural sciences and engineering - it does not.

    "Unpublished result" may be knowledge, which has been distilled from some measurements, computations and discussions, but not yet put into a publication, and probably at the moment not even intended for a publication for some reasons. "Personal communication" is approximately the same, but done by a colleague.

    What may differ these two from "100 or more different types" is that they are commonly used in citations.
  • bdarcus
    "Unpublished result" may be knowledge, which has been distilled from some measurements, computations and discussions, but not yet put into a publication, and probably at the moment not even intended for a publication for some reasons.
    That doesn't explain how manuscript isn't adequate. To repeat and be explicit: what fields do you need for this?
    What may differ these two from "100 or more different types" is that they are commonly used in citations.
    Not particularly relevant. You don't need a type to format a reference correctly. Show me an exampe and maybe I can help you.
  • ben58
    Well, it's still a less common citation type, and after all I can always edit my manuscript after I've inserted the references from Zotero.

    "Letter" is not normally used as a reference type in natural sciences (I've never seen), so if you insist I'd save the reference as a letter, keeping in mind (and as an attached note) that a letter has never existed as such.

    In the same way I would save an "Unpublished results" reference as a "Manuscript", even though I know the manuscript has never existed.

    Just a bit of doublespeak - and the problem can be solved.
  • bdarcus
    I'm not insisting you do anything; I'm asking you to be more specific (I asked you what fields you need, and you didn't answer) so that a more adequate solution can be devised.
  • ben58
    Sorry...

    Well, for "Personal communication", I'd join schneede, who started the discussion: listed the fields
    the name of the person I communicated with, the affiliation of the person, the date of communication

    and that "personal communication" pops up in the bibliography.
    - and the Title, of cause.

    For "Unpublished results", which is similar - the Author(s), their Affiliation, and the Title. The Author field can be empty, meaning the results are mine.
  • RintzeRintze
    So, if I had a number of discussions with a colleague and want to properly cite the source as "Personal communication" - what should I do?

    Another not that uncommon reference type is "Unpublished result".
    I can't recall ever having seen either personal communications or unpublished results as entries in the bibliography of scientific papers (my field is life sciences). Because there isn't a lot to refer to, these type of citations are usually limited to in-text citations. E.g. "Both plant promoter elements confer a basal level of expression on the HIS3 reporter gene in yeast (PBF Ouwerkerk, personal communication)" and "differed by less than 20% between the two strains. (J.T. Pronk et al., unpublished results).".
  • ben58
    A search on Google Scholar with (physical.review personal-communication) results in some 2600 hits, and in substantial part of cases (50% ? ) the "personal communication" is within the paper's bibliography, like

    [28] SJJMF Kokkelmans and EGM van Kempen (personal communication).

    The search for (physical.review unpublished-results) also produced some 2500 hits, the percentage of proper references is apparently lower, but there are also quite a few:
    [11] Q. Guo, FS Pierce, and SJ Poon, unpublished results
  • Tjowens
    Personal communication just seems to be too squishy a thing to make into an item. For example, APA does allow people to cite personal communications (and you see them from time to time in papers), however, APA's definition of personal communication is something that is "not recoverable". For this reason folks cite them in text but are explicitly required to leave them out of the bibliography. The in text citations end up looking like (T. Owens, personal communication, September 28, 1998)

    Zotero items need to make sense across disciplines and fields. So, letters, emails, interviews, presentations, all work OK. They are all somewhat self explanatory things which can be handled differently in different styles, but personal communication seems so vague that different fields make use of fundamentally different ideas about what they are and what info they need.

    It is best to not get hung up on what something is called. Find an item that includes the fields you need, and gets styled the way you need it styled, and use it. In Zotero manuscripts are generally considered to be unpublished documents, if it has the fields you need just go for it. Similarly, the document item is a generic container.
  • bdarcus
    edited September 29, 2009
    Zotero items need to make sense across disciplines and fields. So, letters, emails, interviews, presentations, all work OK.
    Actually, they reflect the biases of the social sciences and (in particular) the humanities ;-)

    In BIBO, FWIW, we distinguish between personal communications (a chat in the hallway or a phone conversation?), and personal communication documents. We then have things like letters as a subclass of the latter.
  • ben58
    @bdarcus
    the problem is Zotero does have ... no type for non-document communications
    - but may be introduce one new item type - "undocumented information", which may contain a field "type" (like "thesis" has one). This subtype may be "personal communication", or "unpublished results", or - for social sciences, e.g. "rumor" :)
  • georgedarroch
    I've found that as a history student, Zotero suits me well. But pers comm does seem to eventuate quite frequently, at least for me. I do a lot of talking to people, and the ideas are objectively theirs. They need citation, and at the moment I'm making do with "interview", and adding in "pers comm" manually.

    Thanks again for the development. Zotero is working very sweetly for me at the moment.
  • George Darroch
    Any movement on this problem?
  • ike9898
    I personally can't use personal communications in my bibliographies but I like to have these items in library. I hope zotero eventually accommodates this.
  • ajlyon
    The communication took some form. Use letter or interview if you are looking for an item type that can hold the appropriate metadata and serve as a parent item for notes and attachments.
  • sara.koopman
    "conversation" would do it for me in my case. it really wasn't an interview, or an email, etc.
  • josephg
    For those using APA formatting, remember that personal communications like emails are not mentioned in the reference list as they are unverifiable. See http://www.apastyle.org/learn/faqs/cite-individual-email.aspx

    Thus it is probably easier to simply type the citation.

    Joseph.
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