MLA 2008/09 Update!

jglickman

From Purdue's OWL - http://bit.ly/9MLYtK

Basic Style for Citations of Electronic Sources (Including Online Databases)

Here are some common features you should try and find before citing electronic sources in MLA style. Not every Web page will provide all of the following information. However, collect as much of the following information as possible both for your citations and for your research notes:

* Author and/or editor names (if available)
* Article name in quotation marks (if applicable)
* Title of the Website, project, or book in italics. (Remember that some Print publications have Web publications with slightly different names. They may, for example, include the additional information or otherwise modified information, like domain names [e.g. .com or .net].)
* Any version numbers available, including revisions, posting dates, volumes, or issue numbers.
* Publisher information, including the publisher name and publishing date.
* Take note of any page numbers (if available).
* Date you accessed the material.
* URL (if required, or for your own personal reference).

jglickman

Note sample page, including NYTimes:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/12/

ajlyon

Yes, but newspaper articles on websites should be cited using rules for newspaper articles, not the general rules for websites. Forum posts should be cited using rules for forum posts, etc.

ajlyon

My god that's ridiculous. I'm going to stay out of style discussions from now on, at least until the people writing them get their heads screwed on straight.

I'll let those who actually live and breathe styles pick up the conversation from here. Not sure how to help you.

jglickman

I think you might want to discuss that idea with the MLA and Purdue.

ajlyon

I know it's not something you can change. I generally focus on data import, workflow, and things like that here. There are style experts here on the forum who can help figure out how to fit this MLA requirement, and I'm sure something can be done.

I'm not opposed to seeing a publisher field for newspaper, journal, and magazine articles; they only don't have them because styles weren't known to require publisher information for items of these types.

adamsmith

Yeah, I can have a look, but I'm not too optimistic this can be done. MLA has all these odd requirements that don't work super well with Zotero - same for the names of online databases. Why MLA would think that anyone cares if I get a copy of an article from EBSCO or JSTOR is completely beyond me - but they very clearly do, so we'll have to find ways to address that - I'm thinking the "publisher" for online Newspapers might go in the same field as the database provider for online articles (the field could be "source" or so) - that would keep the underlying data model somewhat neat. I'll see if this is possible to hack until then, but I'm not super hopeful.

jglickman

I can neither explain nor defend the MLA's byzantine ideas about how material should be cited, much of which strikes me as what a congress of sadistic pedants would create. (New collective noun: a bore of pedants to go with a parliament of owls.) Some of us have wended our way to Zotero to try to reduce the pain. Sorry to inflict it on you; it's not intentional.

bdarcus

A journal database provider is NOT anything like a publisher, any more than Borders is because it happens to be where you buy a book (can you tell I agree with previous comments that this is a dumb rule?).

As I've said elsewhere, it's more like a "source" or a "repository."

Simon

Zotero already has a "Library Catalog" field for this, although I don't think CSL has a variable to map it to.

ajlyon

Yes, I think we should just map Library Catalog to a new "source" field, add Publisher to newspaper/journal/magazine, and this will work fine.

ajlyon

And I think that the publisher for newspapers makes sense in general-- it should be mapped to "publisher" in CSL. It may not be shown for paper newspapers, but they have publishers too. (That is, I disagree with adamsmith on this point.)

adamsmith

ajlyon is right - if I understand MLA correctly, if you get, e.g., a NY Times article from Lexis Nexis you'd need to add both Lexis Nexis as the database and NY Times as the publisher.

WRT to "source" - can we agree then to map "Library Catalogue" to a variable in csl? I really don't care about the name, but "source" sounds fine to me.

ajlyon

@adamsmith: That's pretty much the conclusion we had already reached in the type review: https://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/issues#issue/8

adamsmith

I wasn't sure if that actually constituted agreement - especially about the mapping of the Library Catalogue variable.

ajlyon

Bruce was fine with the "source" variable, and he wasn't terribly concerned with how we called it in the Zotero UI.

adamsmith

OK - I'm not going to try to hack this before we have a decent solution with respect to "source". For what it's worth, though, I've fixed the spacing of MLA bibliographies.

buzzrobotics

I think from this thread that Zotero has been given a website publisher/sponsor field, but in the Zotero application, I can't seem to find where this field is under the "Item Type" "Webpage." Could someone show me where to manually put the publisher/sponsor of a website so that it will appear in mla 7th ed bibliographies? Thanks.

adamsmith

no, there is currently no publisher field for webpages. You can try if a different item type works better.

ZachB

Is there any workaround for adding the publisher field to webpages? because it would be nice to not have to edit each citation.