Item type "software" in Zotero exported as @misc in better bibtex

huongisu

This question seems to be related to this one

I wish I could attach my screenshots. The citation for R software in my Zotero has "Software" filled in the Item Type field. The exported .bib file shows

@misc{rdevelopmentcoreteamLanguageEnvironmentStatistical2021,
title = {R: {{A Language}} and {{Environment}} for {{Statistical Computing}}},
author = {{R Development Core Team}},
year = {2021},
month = feb,
address = {{Vienna, Austria}},
howpublished = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing},
isbn = {3-900051-07-0}
}

I had expected @misc to be @Manual. There is no "Manual" item type from the drop-down list. How do I fix this? Thanks a lot.

adamsmith

You can post-process with a BBT hook, but plain bibtex just doesn't have a proper type for software, and it's not clear to me that manual is better than misc.
BibLaTeX does have a software item type, so if that's an option, you'd be better off with it.

huongisu

If my R packages are marked @misc, they will be listed as [Dataset] in my References section. Only as @Manual do they appear properly.
How do I apply the software item type to multiple entries (not all because some @misc items are correctly listed as @misc) and have it saved? The item type "software" in Zotero does not translate to @software or @Manual, but @misc in .bib. My fix now is to open the .bib file in a tex processing and manually change each of the @misc items.

bwiernik

If you are writing in RMarkdown, you should use CSL YAML or CSL-JSON for your bibliography file, not either form of .bib. pandoc converts .bib to CSL anyway, so starting off with the native format will yield the best results.

If you are citing R packages in LaTeX, you should use BibLaTeX, not BibTeX. BibTeX hs 30 years old and not really capable of accurately capturing electronic references anymore. BibLaTeX is much better equipped for software and electronic citation, particularly because it has a @software type