Cite multiple types of locators for one item

ElkePapelitzky

I am citing many classical Chinese books, in which I have to give a chapter (called juan) number as well as a page number. However, when adding a note I can only add one type of reference. The way the chapter and page needs to be cited varies. E.g.:

Title, j. 1, 5a-6b
Title, 1, 5a-6b
Title, 1.5a-6b


Obviously the problem of prefixing the "j." or not can easily be solved by changing any of the locator prefixes to "j.". but that would still have to make me enter manually if chapter number and page number a separated by "." or ", ".

Would it be possible to add more than one type of locator for an item, choosing in the dropdown menu first "chapter" and then "page" and entering both?
I guess there are not many people who would need it and it probably is difficult to implement, but I'm asking anyway in case it's not that difficult after all.

bwiernik

It's actually a rather difficult problem. The CSL citation style language that Zotero uses currently only supports one locator per citation.

The easiest ways to do this would be to do as you describe and choose "Chapter" as the locator type, then type the page in the chapter field: "1, 5a-6b". You could also enter the full locator as a suffix: "j. 1, 5a-5b"


A more complex approach would be to modify the CSL style to accept multiple locators:

fbennett
April 17, 2013 edited April 17, 2013

It is actually possible to do this, but the style needs to be coded to support it. The structure used is not valid CSL, so you will get a warning when you install the style, and it will not be accepted for inclusion in the Style Repository.

The structure looks like this:
<number variable="locator"/>

The only difference is the use of "number" rather "text" for the node. You can then add labels using short abbreviations, directly in the field. So volume 15, page 23 would look like this in the locator field:
v. 15, p. 23

If you do try this, I would be curious to know how you find it for useability.

I don't know that the second option is particularly easier than just typing the "1, 5a-5b" in the chapter field.

ElkePapelitzky

Thank you for your answer.
It got me thinking and I found a solution that works for me to have the style set the delimiter between chapter number and page number:

I changed the text for the folio locator to "j." and added a suffix in the CSL after the locator number (i.e. number variable="locator" suffix=", " if I want it to look like j. 5, 5a).
When citing, I now add the page number in the suffix field instead of the locator field.

This also adds the ", " after the juan number, even if there is no page number following looking like that: "j. 5, ."
To fix that, I also changed the locator for chapter to "j." but did not add the suffix. So if I want to cite just a juan without the page numbers, I will choose "chapter", if I want to cite a juan with page numbers, I will choose "folio".

Now this works if I only need to cite pages from one single juan, if I need to cite pages from multiple juan I still need to manually enter the format including the delimiter between chapter and page in the "suffix" field. But it's a start and should lead to much less editing if different journals require different ways of citing Chinese sources.

Another problem is that when I enter a page range in the suffix field, it does not change the hyphen to an en-dash, but typing that is not too much trouble.

I hope this explanation makes sense and maybe it helps someone else who has the same problem.