grouping citations (e.g. 1a-d, 2 instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

ox

hello.

I would like to group some, not all, citations.

e.g.

Tim walked across the park, where he saw a dog, which bit him^(1a-c).
The sky was blue^(2).

~.~.~

(1a) Nature, 2008

(1b) Science, 1993

(1c) The Sun, 2009

(2) The Times, 2009

---------------instead of-------------------------------

Tim walked across the park, where he saw a dog, which bit him^(1, 2, 3).
The sky was blue^(4).

~.~.~

(1) Nature, 2008

(2) Science, 1993

(3) The Sun, 2009

(4) The Times, 2009

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

any ideas most appreciated.

(deadline in six days)

ox.

fbennett

ox,

Offhand this looks like something not supported in current Zotero. With a six-day horizon, you're probably best off hand editing things to produce the results you're after. Beyond that, it's not clear what logic lies behind your example. In particular, how would back-references be handled? If there were a second reference to item "1b", for example, would that show as "1b" again, or would you want the reference to be repeated in the bibliography with a fresh number? (If the latter, then this is more of note style than a reference mark + bibliography style.)

What would be most helpful is a pointer to the style guide that requires this formatting and provides specific guidance.

noksagt

I know that Appl. Phys. Lett. & other AIP publications inter-sperse footnotes & references & a single foot-note number may have citation information (and possibly commentary) for multiple publications. I don't think that they mandate this style and I don't think items within a group are individually numbered. When authors use this style, they do not ever re-reference only a single member of the reference group: they refer to the group as a whole.

The idea of grouping multiple citations as one is generically useful for many styles for articles with errata (although perhaps there will be some special relation when we have hierarchical items, such that you can always cite both the original article & the corrections using only a single item).

fbennett

I'm curious how this would look on the page. Found the APL site, but wasn't able to locate any style guidelines.

http://apl.aip.org/

If anyone has a more specific url, feel free to add it to this thread.

noksagt

Their author guidelines are minimalistic. Will try to remember to give a link to an article that uses this more compact style the next time I run across one.