item REVIEW missing

ac1211

Hi everybody,

I am managing a quite big group library and I have many reviews to record. The item 'review' does not exist, so I have to use the item 'journal article', where you can specify who is the 'reviewed author'. Would it be possible to add an item 'review', since a review is something very different to what you refer to as a (scholarly) journal article?

Anna

adamsmith

We've had that request a fair amount and might do it, but I'm personally not convinced that it makes a lot of sense. Reviews can appear in any form -- as a journal article, a blogpost, a newspaper article, a magazine article, a webpage. I don't really see how forcing all of those into a single category is better than treating each review as what it is in terms of publication: an article in a journal, in a magazine, a blogpost, etc.

DWL-SDCA

Most reviews are a type of journal article for the purpose of citation style. Sometimes reviews are in the form of reports. To designate reviews in your library I recommend that you use a tag (perhaps, assign a color to the tag).

This applies to book reviews, reviews of the body of an author's work, or a review of the literature on a topic. These kinds of publications are in the form of a journal article or (rarely) a report. I'm not aware of a citation style that requires that reviews be presented in a format that is different from an article or a report.

ac1211

I see your point and you are right in saying that reviews can appear in different forms and that in a way it wouldn't make much sense to force that into a single category. For my library purposes, however, it would be good if the user could immediately see what is an article in a scholarly journal and what is a review and since most of my reviews are inside scholarly journals, at the end it can be a bit misleading. Actually the solution I have found is to group all the reviews into a subcollection, so I will just keep doing that:-) Tags cannot be a solution, unfortunately, because I decided to use it in a different way, so they carry only content information. Many thanks for your comments and suggestions, anna

bwiernik

One possibility that might be nice when Zotero has an updated user interface would be if the icon could change for items if the reviewed author or title variables were added.

ac1211

this would be great: it could be in the same 'item category->journal' but the little icon could be slightly different (an R on the top of it for instance?) in order to make the user understand that it is a review. The same could at best apply every category when REVIEWED AUTHOR is used, no matter if it is a journal article, a blog post or whatever.

m.lana

hi,
i think that *review needs to be recognized as a specific and new type* of publication.
because it has intrinsically 2 sections of identification data: 1 part referring to the reviewed object (author, title, publisher, date, ...) and 1 part referring to the hosting resource (review author, title of the publicati on, date, ...).

sometimes the main relevance is for the hosting publication, and sometimes it is for the reviewed publication.
best
maurizio

ac1211

Thank you m.lana, to try to avoid the problem of the 2 sections for the time being I have created 2 items: 1 for the reviewed object, 1 for the review, and then I have connected the review to the reviewed object via the Zotero link functionality. However this is not satisfying enough and for me it would be really ideal to have a new item specifically devoted to reviews.
Please, Zotero, consider it!
Many thanks,
Anna

m.lana

hi ac1211,
thank you for your suggestion!
your remark made me think that the items with 1 or more "related" are not immediately evident.
is there any way to automatically evidence an item with an active "related"?
best
maurizio

LiborA

is there any way to automatically evidence an item with an active "related"

Unfortunately no, this request is a litle bit similar to older request on relation of citing and cited documents (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/64807/future-development-type-of-relation-between-zotero-records). There are also other types of items which could be automatically evidence (e. g. book - book chapter)

ac1211

Right, unfortunately not. We could add that request in the Zotero whiteboard as a desideratum.

bwiernik

This forum thread is sufficient as a place to post requests.

m.lana

i was re-reading this thread and noticed the post by ac1211 where s/he says "so I have to use the item 'journal article', where you can specify who is the 'reviewed author'. "
but: if i create a journal article item, i don't see any "reviewed author" field.
any idea?
best
maurizio

adamsmith

click on the arrow to the left of "Author" to select the creator type. The dropdown includes Reviewed author.

m.lana

wow, blazingly wonderful! thank you
maurizio