Upgrade StorageImporting a complete citation
Hello! I am trying to add a completed citation into my Zotero library. That way, as I type in a word document, all I have to do is find this reference and it will automatically cite it in my paper without messing up the formatting.
EX:
Howlader N, Noone AM, Krapcho M, Miller D, Brest A, Yu M, Ruhl J, Tatalovich Z, Mariotto A, Lewis DR, Chen HS, Feuer EJ, Cronin KA (eds). SEER Cancer Statistics Review, 1975-2018, National Cancer Institute. Bethesda, MD, https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2018/, based on November 2020 SEER data submission, posted to the SEER website, April 2021.
How do I do this? I need it to appear just like this as that is what the authors ask for so I am trying not to "fill in the blanks" and simply add in a completed citation. Can I do that? Thanks in advance!
EX:
Howlader N, Noone AM, Krapcho M, Miller D, Brest A, Yu M, Ruhl J, Tatalovich Z, Mariotto A, Lewis DR, Chen HS, Feuer EJ, Cronin KA (eds). SEER Cancer Statistics Review, 1975-2018, National Cancer Institute. Bethesda, MD, https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2018/, based on November 2020 SEER data submission, posted to the SEER website, April 2021.
How do I do this? I need it to appear just like this as that is what the authors ask for so I am trying not to "fill in the blanks" and simply add in a completed citation. Can I do that? Thanks in advance!
Authors can suggest how a work is cited, but the actual format of a citation is determined by the citation style you're using. E.g., if you were to put the above in a document using APA style, that'd be unambiguously wrong (and also quite unusable since the date is towards the end).
Please explain further the purpose of your document and where you plan to submit (or if in academia turn-in) your work. Most universities and journals have very specific requirements for how references must be formatted. One of the values of Zotero is that it will format references exactly according to the citation style standards required.
With Zotero you should (almost) never need to hand-type (or copy/paste) your references. You can import most things directly into Zotero from the website where you found it. You can import the webpage you linked to in your question (above) and much of the necessary metadata is automatically placed into the proper fields in your Zotero program. Unfortunately, the SEER website documents' metadata has always been at best poor and is sometimes horrible. In this case you will need to hand enter the author names. However, see my note below about using Google Scholar to ease this pain. (Please, except in this particular circumstance never trust the GS cite process. Always use the GS link to the publisher and capture the metadata from the publisher's website.)
In a situation like this I often go to Google Scholar, enter the item title, click the cite option and select the RefMan link. This will bring into Zotero a partial citation. In this case I can capture the author list. If you import the webpage into Zotero and then bring in the GS cite into Zotero you can merge the two items into one (more complete) entry. In this case the GS cite has the item as a "journal article" so you will need to change that Zotero record to Webpage before you can do the merge. I tend to select the record with the most complete author list as the master. Use the icons at the right to merge the other important things (URL, language, abstract, website title, etc.) into the keeper record and then click on the Merge box at the top of the metadata listing. Voila! you have a nearly perfect Zotero record. The only thing you will need to add is the accessed date. My own standard is to edit the author list to include periods after each author initial and a space between initials. Zotero itself may handle this when formatting the citation to the specified style. I mostly use Zotero for another purpose and I need the author names formatted in a certain way in the MODS format file that I export.
No one will expect you to use the exact "suggested citation" format that is on that webpage. That format is preposterous and omits some of the essential information such as date accessed.
[I tried to see if the Zotero PDF functions with the version 6 beta might bring in the author names but I see that cancer.gov is up to its old tricks and will not complete the download/hand-off process. (The download hangs at the final kb and waiting several minutes will not let the download complete.) Thus I couldn't test this.]