Highlighting incomplete bibliography items

kirk86

Is there any possibility to highlight incomplete bibliography items? These are items that probably are missing journal field or some other required field value. Also, it would be nice if in the info right panel we could have the compulsory fields in bold face just to make evident what is mandatory from those fields and what is not.

Thanks!

adamsmith

We have talked about this, but there is no such thing as compulsory fields, neither globally nor for specific styles. You'll e.g. find journal articles without issue or volume number and without pages, in some cases even without authors (and where those don't exist, they obviously aren't mandatory.) Books make lack publisher, place, or date, etc. On the other hand, some styles require fairly unusual fields such as library catalog (MLA) or ISBN (ISO 690)

It could be viable to flag items missing common fields for review (Mendeley does that), but that requires more GUI-related work.

kirk86

Maybe I did formulate the question wrong but essentially this is what I meant:
"flag items missing common fields"
Essentially a lot of ref. managers do that by checking what are common fields for bibtex and then based on those they flag the items and at the same time make those fields in the info panel show in bold face.

emilianoeheyns

While it won't highlight anything in the UI, you can enable the quality report in BBT and it will add comments to the output about missing bib(la)tex fields, which could help identifying missing common fields in Zotero. The QR is most useful for biblatex, which has better documentation on valid field combinations. In bibtex export you also get a QR but its checks are a lot simpler.

kirk86

Thanks @emilianoheyns !

makislog

@emilianoeheyns @kirk86 can you please guide me to do it?

emilianoeheyns

Preferences - BBT - Export - Misc - Include comments about potential problems with the exported entries

makislog

Thanks a lot!