Item types

bebber · January 18, 2022

I remain perplexed by the choice of Item Types in Zotero.
Surely the following do not require separate classes: Blog Posts, Dictionary Entries, Forum Posts, Instant Message, Interview, Magazine Article AND Newspaper Article (what's the difference?); Radio Broadcast AND TV Broadcase (surely Broadcast would do for both).

And we still lack a category for Data or Dataset, despite the fact that many in the natural sciences will be citing datasets in their work.

Several questions: Who decides on what gets included as an Item Type? Can we manually change the Item Types? Why do we still lack a Dataset item type?

adamsmith · January 18, 2022

All of the above (with the exception of instant message, which is probably how Zotero dates itself...) have separate entries in major style guides such as APA and Chicago Manual. Just because you don't need them doesn't mean they're not relevant/important.

Like all decisions in Zotero, item types are determined by Zotero's core development team based on user feedback. With item types in particular, though, they haven't been updated for more than 10 years for technical reasons, so they lag behind developments in citation practices in several instance, data/dataset being one of them (many, many threads on this topic should you want to learn more).

You can't add custom item types, no, but you can "force" item types that are available in the citation style language by using the Extra field as described here for datasets: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/translators/datasets and here https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/item_types_and_fields#citing_fields_from_extra more generally. That information will be migrated once the corresponding fields exist in Zotero, which shouldn't take *too* long (i.e. hopefully this year, but no promises).

BrunoGebarski · February 1, 2022

It woud be preferable—if possible—to give us users [my databank is 22 GB] the flexibility to assign our own 'Item Types' without affecting the generic [but outdated 'Item Types'] Zotero layout; by adding ourselves for our own databank new 'Item types' such as 'Twitter', 'Gab', 'FB', 'Instagram' and/or 'Library' et al.] Thank you so much for a brilliant program [Bruno Gebarski, Hamburg, Germany].