Other contributors?

tdenmead

In section 14.105 of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th), it presents how to reference other contributors listed on the title page. I am trying to cite *Familiar Stranger* by Stuart Hall. On the title page, Stuart Hall is listed as the author, and Bill Schwarz is listed as a contributor--"with Bill Schwarz" is in much smaller font beneath Hall's lead.

I'm not sure how to enter this into zotero. When I use "contributor," Schwarz's name is not included in the reference. But it doesn't seem appropriate to reference them as co-authors.

I'm sure this has been posted before, but I was unable to use the search function to retrieve any threads that specifically answered this question. Thanks for any advice!

djross3

I'd like to second this request/question. I have several academic works where there is a second contributor/author listed as "with" on the front cover or title page, but not as the author of the book. (Often for example this may be a language consultant, a speaker, in the case of a descriptive grammar of a language. Out of respect to them they should be included, but they are not co-authors of the book at least not according to the way it was published.)

What is the appropriate way to handle such cases in Zotero? Should they simply be skipped over? Should they be added as co-authors? Is there any alternative?

For now I've just been doing this impressionistically, deciding whether a "with"-contributor is important enough to be added as a co-author or should be skipped, but that's arbitrary and doesn't respect the phrasing of the original work.

bwiernik

Generally you would not cite “with” contributors at all. You can enter these names as “Contributor” in Zotero and they won’t show up in any citations.

djross3

Do you have a reference for that? It seems odd to me to not give credit where it is due, but at the same time it's sort of an odd choice for the author to give them credit in that quirky way, so maybe that's the answer-- just leave it there, on the book cover, don't cite.

bwiernik

I don’t have a specific reference, but what you say is exactly right about why they are credited as “with” rather than just being listed as an author.

adamsmith

Here's what Chicago Manual says about this:

Such names may be included in a full note or a bibliography entry if they are considered to be a significant factor in a reader’s assessment of the book. For ghostwritten books, with is usually sufficient. For other contributions, descriptions should accurately convey the information on the title page.

This is a "may" rule so it is indeed OK to exclude them, but more importantly, it's such a flexible set of instructions that there's just no way we could automate that, so if you care about these details (and there are absolutely scenarios where you should), I just don't see a way around manually updating those citations.
In my view, this would be mainly for researchers in the humanities and adjacent social sciences. In the more science-y world, what bwiernik says is indeed the norm.

djross3

That makes sense, unfortunately. So I'll just make a judgment call about whether I'll consider the additional contributors co-authors or not, and leave it at that.

Secondary question:
If I did want to manually update (for this or another reason) is there any way to "tag" the output to indicate that a particular reference is known to have broken formatting I need to fix manually? This comes up once in a while with weird documents. And it could also patch any other issues with Zotero that haven't yet been fixed.

Another example, completely unrelated to Zotero, is that when citing a reference that has text in Hebrew (e.g., title), that usually gets corrupted in MS Word (on Mac), so I want to go back through and manually check/fix those citations. It's easy enough to visually skim for Hebrew text in the references section, but would be nice to have an option to "tag" it as such to make sure I don't miss it, and for any other similar exceptions.

Having an "exception" feature in Zotero would make everything much more flexible. I don't mind a bit of manual editing at all. I just don't want to forget something.

adamsmith

I could see reserving a tag for this in Zotero itself, but that's the best I have. There's no simple way of tagging in the word document proper.

djross3

It would be nice if there was a way to, say, highlight a reference line in yellow for a known-to-be-problematic reference.

I suppose I could preface the author's name with "***..." if I really wanted to be awkward about it. That would actually work, but would be inconvenient for other obvious reasons.

bwiernik

You could try to add “with” to the Contributor’s Name in Zotero. That might produce an accurate or workable bibliography.

djross3

Depending on the style. It would cause odd things to happen when reversing first and last names in some styles, though.
(I've done something similar to a paper with dozens of authors by forcing one to be "et al.", which sort of worked.)

bwiernik

Yes, it's obviously an ugly workaround that would need to be adjusted per each style.

arggem

@djross3

I suppose I could preface the author's name with "***..." if I really wanted to be awkward about it. That would actually work, but would be inconvenient for other obvious reasons.

It might be somewhat less awkward to add the *** as a prefix to the citation itself instead of changing the name.

djross3

The whole point would be to do it automatically when adding that reference to a bibliography, though. That is, I want Zotero to remind me that I need to update an entry manually, rather than me needing to remember it's special when I insert it.

Having it before the name would change the sorting order, so I'd see all of the broken citations at the top of my references list, and I'd know I needed to fix those and of course move them down to the appropriate location.

I'm trying to figure out if I can come up with some conditional formatting for this. Working my way through the code, not sure yet. I'll post back if I figure it out.

adamsmith

If you want to be hardcore, you could add something like

annote: Needs Hebrew fixed in the extra field and then add
<text variable="annote" font-weight="bold"/> somewhere to your citation style's bibliography section, which will add your note in bold to that item in the bibliography.

Obviously this does require customizing any citation style you're using.

You can pick any other variable here:https://aurimasv.github.io/z2csl/typeMap.xml but annote has the advantage that it isn't used in any citation style.

djross3

@adamsmith thank you. I actually was through trial and error coming up with something similar to that.

I made a new variable name: "zoteroflag"
(Is that OK? It seems to work!)

So in the extra field, I'd write:
zoteroflag: year (whatever text you want)

And then in the citation style I added, before the author's name:
<if variable="zoteroflag">
<text variable="zoteroflag" prefix="*[" suffix="]* "/>
</if>

That then comes out in the bibliography as:
*[year]* Jespersen, Otto. 1909. A Modern English Grammar on historical principles. 7 vols. Heidelberg, Copenhagen, etc.: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, Ejnar Munskgaard, etc.

It will be sorted first, so it will be obvious it needs to be fixed, and the text "year" can be whatever you want. In this case, I want the year to be a range, "1909-1949", which I will update manually.

This is sort of an awkward hack, but it means that Zotero is no longer limited to features that are supported automatically, since in principle I can now do anything manually as needed. In fact, I could even include the actual correction in the note rather than just the type of correction needed.

I think this is going to make me a lot happier, and confident I won't forget to manually fix things, while not being bothered by many of the little quirks of citations that Zotero can't easily be modified to handle at this time.

adamsmith

I'm honestly surprised this works and there's no guarantee it'll keep working if you use a custom variable, though it's also not super likely it'll break. annote will definitely keep working, though.

bwiernik

What I would recommend is that your write with a single custom style like you’ve made, then make a list of the annotated refs that need manual fixes before switching to whichever actual style you want. This way, you won’t have to modify every single style you ever use.

djross3

@adamsmith -- OK, I will switch it to annote.

@bwiernik -- that's a great idea. (Currently I'm mostly trying to prepare a single style for my dissertation which will have ~3,000 references. But I also use other styles for publications I submit-- easier to proofread those carefully if needed, though.)

Any chance this is something that could be added to Zotero for those of us who want help with manual customization? I really don't mind manually fixing things at all (and means Zotero doesn't need to cater to my every need), but I'm concerned about forgetting to make changes, and this saves me. I think this could help others too.

bwiernik

No, CSL isn't going to add personal-use styles like this to the official repository, but you are free to host it on your own website for others' use (e.g., here are several styles for my own use: https://github.com/bwiernik/zotero-tools).

DWL-SDCA

Here is what I do for cites that I know I will need to edit as the final step before submitting. I add a "word" at the end of the item's title. I use "QQQQ". As the final cleanup step I search for that string and make the needed edits to the reference (and delete my nonsense word).

djross3

@bwiernik -- I understand. I didn't mean hosting a personal style, but rather adding in this option in some optional/standard way so that others could flag the citations they want to modify. But since there might be some variation (for example, some might want the note to appear at the end of the reference, and not re-sort), I'll just post this here in case it helps others. Maybe it can be added as a note somewhere in the documentation if others find it useful. Still testing the details but I think this will work well.

@DWL-SDCA -- that's an option, but it won't automatically re-sort the entries, and you'll need to remember your 'code' and to search for it. Easy to forget that, I think. With my method, it will make it almost impossible to overlook because the first entries in your references will be obviously wrong.

djross3

One correction, one question:

1. Just for anyone reading this, my code above is overly complex. Only one line is needed:
<text variable="annote" prefix="*[" suffix="]* "/>
It's only printed if there is a value. (I didn't know that before.)

2. I thought the sorting was working properly, but it seems to have been coincidental. I thought that the prefix "*[" would ensure that it is sorted first in (almost) any realistic scenario. But apparently that's ignored just as a symbol, and whatever letter is first gets sorted. So if your note is "a" then it's first, or "z" it's last. Using the prefix "*1[" seems to work, whatever note it included, so the number is sorted first.

My question: is there documentation anywhere to indicate exactly how sorting is accomplished, and which character is sorted absolutely first? I'd like to insert that character in this code.

Edit: huh! Apparently just adding a space before the * is enough to sort it first. Does that seem correct to everyone else? That's ASCII 32, the first non-technical character, so I suppose nothing else would ever go before that (except of course multiple spaces).

djross3

OK, after a little more testing, it looks like space, $ and numbers all sort first, whereas most other symbols are ignored for sorting. So I think I'll use the following:

<text variable="annote" prefix=" $0*[" suffix="]* "/>

The resulting reference (sorted first) is like this:
$0*[note]* Author. YYYY. Title...

Maybe overkill, but should be reliable, and clearly offsets it as special, since that's the point.

Any suggestions/concerns?