Multiple sources in same Journal volume, no delineated articles

aaandrew

I am new to Zotero, and I searched as best I could but didn't find an answer to this, so please excuse me if it's a basic question.

I am citing multiple advertisements and articles from 19th-century journals usually found in archive.org or google books. These journals do not have delineated articles, and of course advertisements aren't delineated either, so I'm having to manually cite them. I can get the full citation for the volume of the journal (e.g. vol 30, 1891), but because I'm having to manually add an advertisement or snippet from a short article, I'm also having to add the citation details manually.

I feel like I can't just add these items as notes to the main journal item, as I need the tagging and notes functionality for each advertisement or snippet.

So, suggestions for the best way to capture these? I have hundreds of items to enter into Zotero. And I've decided the best item type for the advertisements is to just call them magazine articles.

Thanks

bwiernik

To accurately cite them, I would just enter them as Journal Articles. This will yield the correct journal, volume, issue, and page information.

adamsmith

Do you have an opinion on how you'd like a citation to one of these to look?

aaandrew

Thanks for your help.

I imagine a citation that would take you to the right volume, issue and page, just like a one-page journal article, would work fine. I've done a few manually. It seems to work ok.

What I've started to do is get the citation for the whole volume by using the web translator within Zotero for archive.org or google books. That brings in a single item citation with all of the information. I then create the individual references within that volume as independent items. I still have to enter the journal title, volume, issue and page manually. As I do that I then link them to the main volume reference using the "Related" tab. Not sure what benefit this linking will get me, but I guess I can always go to the main citation and see all of the items that came out of the volume. Each volume is about 1300+ pages (it was a weekly trade journal) and there are two volumes per year after about 1883, up to 1922, just missing a few years. There are a lot of small bits of information from which I have to weave a story explaining what was happening. I'm still trying to figure out how I want to use collections.

Is there a difference between "journal" and "magazine" citations in Zotero? When I was in academe, quite a while ago, we didn't use the term "magazine" we just called them all "journals."

bwiernik

You might find it faster to import an actual journal article, then delete the title, authors, pages, and DOI. Also, the Zutilo plugin will let you select all of the ads for an issue and Relate them all together with one click.

adamsmith

That sounds reasonable as a process for me.
Journals are typically academic journals. They typically appear monthly or rarer, have clearly visible volume and issue numbers, and tend to have longer pieces, often peer-reviewed. (Think American Historical Review, or Nature).
Magazines are typically weekly, often only have the date of publication visible on the cover, contain shorter pieces, directed at a more general audience. (Think The New Yorker or The Economist). Citation styles like the Chicago Manual tend to treat these somewhat differently.

aaandrew

Makes sense. Of course, where a stationery and fancy goods trade publication from the 19th-century fits in, ... I would have to come down on the side of magazine. But the fields I need seem to be in both, so not sure if there's a meaningful difference. I'm sure this was taken as seriously by its readership at the time as Nature or American Historical Review is today by their audiences.

I would love it if the online journals I'm using understood what was an article and what was an ad, but these are basically images with rough OCR in the background to facilitate some level of searching. I have to actually crop the image to add it to the item, and transcribe the article to get the text. It guess it will have to be the hard way for me. But then no one said it would be easy. :-) I'm downloading as many of the volumes as I can and I am going to try and separate them out into issues to facilitate handling and management, but that's as good as it will get.

Thanks again for your suggestions. So far it seems like Zotero is going to work for me. I've been struggling with OneNote, but wishing for computerized 3x5 cards. Then as soon as I started adding newspapers the number of references and notes started to more than double and I knew I was in trouble. When I was working on my Ph.D. I actually did use 3x5 cards. Move with the times.