Short Story as Item Type

MattColburn

There is no way to correctly name the item type for a short story. This should be its own field. Thank you.

LiborA

Has a short story a specific rules for citation in some style?
New items are planned in 5.1 version, but I am not sure if the type short story is so important. Currently you can use any similar type, for example document, and taged it as short story.

bwiernik

Item Types in Zotero are structured primarily around citation needs. So you generally should store short stories as a book section (if published in an anthology) or as a blog post, magazine article, etc. if published independently. The challenge is that every field has its own set of meaningful item categories that would be irrelevant to researchers in other fields (e.g., a literary scholar might want to distinguish between novels, biographies, short stories, poems, etc.; an art historian might distinguish between prints, paintings, murals, reliefs, sculptures in the round, photographs, photgraphic plates, etc.; physicists might distinguish full articles, reviews, communications, data briefs, etc.). The number of possible item types is limitless, and attempting to provide a different item type for each possibility would make Zotero unwieldy for users in any field. (This also doesn't address varying citation needs for, e.g., short stories published in different formats.)

The approach that Zotero takes is to provide a flexible set of generic item types designed around their citation needs. Field- or researcher-specific information can be stored using Tags, the Extra field, or relevant other fields (e.g., the Format and Type fields).

For your case, I would recommend storing short stories as Book Section if they are published in an anthology, as a Magazine or Journal Article if published in a periodical, as a Blog Post or Website if published as an online article, or as a Book or Report if published as a standalone publication. You can mark items as "short stories" (versus, e.g., novels, biographies, poems, etc.) using Tags (you can use colored tags to provide a quick visual marker of item type) or by putting this information in Extra (or another unused field, such as Call Number--some item types also provide a Type or Format field).

If you want to include "Short Story" or "Novel", etc. in your bibliographies, you can add them to the Extra field like this:
medium: Short Story
or
genre: Short Story

And you can then add the medium or genre variables to your citation style.

The ability to create custom item types and fields is planned for the medium-term, but no ETA on when this feature be available.

MattColburn

I don't think it's a parallel situation. Art historians can call any work "artwork," whereas I'm forced to call a short story that isn't published in an anthology either a "document" or an "article." Neither seem to fit quite right. Tagging an item as its genre also doesn't make perfect sense since other tags denote content/themes and not form.

adamsmith

future versions of Zotero may have custom item types that you could use for this (probably 1-2 years out is a good guess), but as a general item type, short story is way too specific to be useful; it's not going to happen.

MattColburn

What about "short literary work"? That would include short stories, poems, microfiction, novel excerpts.

adamsmith

What's the use case here, though? As far as I know, no major citation style, including humanities styles like MHRA, Chicago, and MLA, talk about special rules for citing these. Moreover, for referencing, and thus a reference manager the form of publication is typically more important than a genre. A Poem in the New Yorker, for example, is a magazine article; a poem in an anthology is a book section; a poem in a more academically oriented journal may be a journal article; a poem you find in an archive is a manuscript. I don't see how adding a new item type helps with this type of thing -- if anything it confuses it.