Type Journal/Newspaper/Magazine

Hi,

I am trying to enter some entire journals an not just articles, but there seems to be no type for journals, newspapers and magazines themselves (it's the same with encyclopedia and dictionaries, but it's no problem to enter them as books). Is there something I don't see? Or is the only way to work around it, to enter journals etc. as books?

Thanks!
  • I think that would be just books (or documents, depending on what you want)- there is no seperate category in any case.
    Do you just want to have them in your database or would you want to cite them at a later point in time?
    For the former, I don't think the category matters much - you can just attach a tag to them.
    For the latter - how would such a citation look e.g.?
  • This has come up before in discussion of hierarchical item types, and it's something that will probably eventually be possible.
  • edited March 3, 2009
    There is also a ticket for this--see links in the ticket for other forum discussions of this issue.
  • For reference: A similar thread has been started here:
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/13117/entire-journals/
    (it's not about journals themselves but about journal issues as item types)
  • On the same subject I see the following related issues:
    1) There is not descriptive help what an entry type should be used for (I had a separate proposal ("bubble help") on that)
    2) If you entered you data, but you found the type selected was not optimal (so to say), you cannot change the type of the entry; you can just create a new one, reentering your data, and then drop the old one.
    Why can't I change the type of an entry?
    And yes, I think "book" is not the ideal type for a magazine, maybe just that books have ISBNs while magazines have ISSNs (or similar).
    Also magazines usually have many data in common (name, publisher, etc.) with mostly the issue number changing. A more human-friendly way to handle this would be VERY useful.
  • you cannot change the type of the entry
    Of course you can. Just click the item type in the right-hand pane and choose another type.
  • There's broad consensus for this, and I'm pretty sure it will happen once we get to adding item types/field. Ticket is here: https://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/issues/23
    (when commenting on threads, remember to check the date of the comment you're responding to. 4/5 year old comments are often no longer relevant).
  • Dan Stillman is right: Somehow I tried right mouse on middle panel only (where you can do things like duplicate entry, etc.).
    On the note of adamsmith: If the last message in a thread were referring to the entry above (plus the same explanation), I might not have added my comment.
    But still: Even if the issue was discussed years ago, and a consensus was found, the typical user will be happier with an implementation rather than the consensus (intent do do something). (I had looked at the data model of Zotero, and it's much more complex than I had expected; maybe it's already too complex to understand. Is there any document describing the data model (at dadabase level)? I feel unable to contribute code)
  • of course implementation is better than consensus, but once there is a consensus, there is no need to keep arguing, that's all I meant.

    No, the Zotero data model isn't documented anywhere, the source code - or just browsing zotero.sqlite - are your best bet. Feel free to ask on zotero-dev if you have specific questions (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/zotero-dev ). That said, what's holding up the addition of new item types and fields isn't the local database, where that's actually quite easy to do, but the sync architecture to handle such changes. Dan is currently in the process of re-writing the entire sync structure to work via the Zotero API - targeted for Zotero 4.1. Only when that's done will we be able to implement many of the long-standing (and long agreed on) additions and changes to item types and fields.
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