CMS footnotes for classical, medieval and early English works

dorner

Both Turabian and CMS say that these works are usually cited parenthetically or as footnotes, but are not included. I would like to be able to use Zotero to create footnotes for these, but if I use the book or document item types, n.d. is inserted because no date is included in the citation.

Examples appear in CMS 17 at 14.243

1. Ovid, Amores 1.7.27.

2. Aristotle, Metaphysics 3.2.996b5–8; Plato, Republic 360e–361b.

I'd like to avoid editing the style. Is there a workaround for this?

adamsmith

@bwiernik is good with workarounds, he might have an idea; I don't.
Zotero just can't handle classical works properly at all, so editing the citation style would maybe make some type of hack more viable, but we couldn't actually fix this.

dorner

Here's a related question I have never found an answer for, maybe because it is too obvious. If I am using Word to write a paper and Zotero to insert citations that will be included in a bibliography, can I use Word's own References tools to insert citations that *won't* appear in the bibliography, without messing up my Zotero citations?

adamsmith

You can definitely just use Word foonotes and manually write the references. If you can use Word's own tools I don't know. It's certainly possible this will work but there's also potential for conflicts and I don't know how easily they'd be spotted.

nickbart

A possible workaround for classical references (that does involve editing the style though) could be to tag classical works via an otherwise unused variable by entering, say, `original-author: classical` into the “Extra” field. In the style file, you would then have to suppress printing the date element for all items that contain a nonempty `original-author` variable. If desired, you could also suppress the printing of any bibliography entries for such items.

bwiernik

I would recommend switching to Juris-M, which has a Classic type. Not sure if the Juris-M CMS Style has been updated for 17th edition or if it formats classics properly yet.

Other than that, no way to do this that I can see without modifying the style.

One option would be to enter type: classic in Extra, then add formatting for ‘classic’ items in the style. The style won’t be valid CSL, but should work correctly (Juris-M and Zotero use the same citation style processor).