Feature request: personal communication

vibackup

I was looking for and not finding an option to refer to a personal communication with a scientist, collaborator...
It is rare, but sometimes you simply have to ask somebody "how many surgeries with this method are you doing per year?"
There is no publication about that, so one usually refers to that as personal communication when citing.
There are some similar items (e-mail, interview) that do not really fit...

bwiernik

Email, instant message, or letter are exactly intended for this use case (they map to the Citation Style Language type “personal_communication”). I personally usually just use Email as that is where most of my personal communications happen and I generally don’t cite communications unless I have some record of it. Instant Message does have an icon with a person on it if that is helpful for cueing what it is.

Note that if you cite one of these items, they will appear both in text and in the references section. There has been some discussion about how to handle citations to personal communications that appear only in text rather than the references section, but nothing has yet been decided. At the moment, if you want the communications to not appear in the bibliography, it’s generally easiest to type the citations manually (but I still keep items in Zotero to refer to to keep track of dates, etc.).