Teaching Zotero the right item type (or making Aeon a magazine...)

Theodor44

hello,
when i save a piece from Aeon it's automatically saved as a web page, rather than as a magazine, and the same goes for many other such magazines. Is there a way to "teach" Zotero what type of source it is, so next time it will automatically be categorized appropriately?

bwiernik

Can you give a specific URL for a page that saves incorrectly?

This would require a change to Zotero’s translator for the page.

Theodor44

Here's one example: https://aeon.co/essays/mindfulness-is-loaded-with-troubling-metaphysical-assumptions
it is categorized simply as a webpage, but it's a magazine piece.

DWL-SDCA

Aeon calls itself a "unique digital magazine". But this online 'magazine' doesn't provide volume, issue, or pagination to accompany the essays it offers. These metadata are key to citing a magazine article. The authored essays don't have assigned item numbers in the url - link to the article but the article title.

I've read Aeon essays but never found an opportunity to cite one. If I did, I'd cite as a webpage. I don't believe that citing this as a webpage is demoting Aeon to a lower-class status; if that is your concern.

Theodor44

it's not about status, it's simply more accurate to denote it a magazine. the same goes for The Atlantic, for example, which Zotero likewise classifies as webpage. e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/does-tv-makes-you-dumber-and-more-populist/593287/
basically, i'm asking if i can change it so at least in my libraries certain domains will be classified as i see them.

DWL-SDCA

The Atlantic includes volume and issue metadata for the articles it publishes. If you will look on the Atlantic website under the Magazine menu you will see that you may select specific issues of the magazine. Each issue, and each article within each issue has volume, issue, and pagination metadata that are available to Zotero. There are online-only articles that don't have associated page numberings but these are correctly treated as webpages by Zotero and by authors who cite the online-only material in their academic papers and manuscripts. Some of the online-only articles eventually appear in an actual journal issue. Upon that appearance I'd argue that the Zotero record should be updated to include the complete metadata much as we do with ePub academic journal articles. I'd further argue that the magazine Zotero type will not provide all of the necessary information and format to properly cite material from Aeon. The Zotero website/webpage type does allow proper citation of things from Aeon.

bwiernik

I don’t really agree with those points about the status mattering at all here. Most online magazines can and should probably be cited as “magazines” according to most citation styles—almost no magazines have volume or issue numbers that matter anymore.

The issue here is whether the cite is providing enough metadata for Zotero to be able to determine the item type. I’m not at a computer to be able to check those pages at the moment, but perhaps one of the volunteers who writes the Zotero webpage translators can take a look.

Theodor44

I second @bwiernik, these are magazines and should be categorized as such, regardless of whether or not they appear online, use issues, or have pagination.

bwiernik

Okay, so the issue is that neither of those pages provides any indication in their page metadata about the item type, so Zotero defaults to Webpage with its generic "Embedded Metadata" site translator. Without a dedicated translator for each page, this won't be fixable. Given that the only thing that would change with a dedicated translator is the item type and no other special processing needs to happen during translation (cf. the NYTimes website which has other issues), I don't really see dedicated translators being made for all of these sites.

It's very easy to quickly change the item type for imported items as part of your general checking/cleaning of the item data after import (a step I suggest you always take—for example, to convert the title of the Atlantic article you linked to sentence case), so it's not that big a deal. For most styles, it won't really make a difference whether the item is stored as a Magazine Article or Web Page in any event.