Citing Twitter and Websites on Standalone

robinhaislett
I work in media and communication and I would be thrilled if there was an option for Twitter and just general website citation from the dropdown box in Zotero.

Any suggestions as to how I enter in the information until this change happens?
  • adamsmith
    you can add webpages - the recommended way to do that is to add a snapshot from your browser of choice - in Chrome/Safari do that by right-click --> Take Zotero Snapshot of current page
    If you really want to manually create a webpage item (though there very, very rarely is a reason for that - why would you want to manually add the access data and URL, for example), you can create a different item type and change it to webpage.

    We won't add a special twitter category, but you can save&cite tweets as a blog post (technically, twitter is a "microblogging" service). For the individual view there is even a translator that gives you a url bar icon:
    https://twitter.com/geosources/status/319378390190804992
  • tomcloyd
    (Referring to the standalone version - never use the other.) No. You don't quite get it. I, and I suspect a number of others, do NOT save web documents with Zotero. If I want a webpage copy, I save it to my hard drive, where I can access it directly with all sorts of software. Have been doing this for years.

    I THEN have a document to add to Zotero, if I wish. I always note the URL and download date stamp, so in my case there really IS a need for direct access to a webpage format. Is converting to this format from "document" format trivial? Sure. It's just nonsensical, as well. Unless of course, there's only 5 of us who ever do what I've just described. Frankly, I'll bet that isn't the case at all. FWIW.
  • adamsmith
    edited April 4, 2013
    (please don't yell).

    First, having taught and supported Zotero extensively, I doubt that there are many people who are not using the Snapshot feature to save webpages.

    But if you don't want snapshots, you can turn them off in the general tab of the Zotero preferences (that should work - I'm not 100% it does in Standalone from the connectors). But even then I don't see how it's not much faster to right-click and import the webpage info into Zotero than to go into Zotero and manually create a new item (which involves multiple clicks and copy&pasting URL and access data). In both cases you'd then have to manually link to the webpage you saved.

    Now, no one is forcing you to do that and you're free to keep doing whatever is working for you, but that's the workflow envisioned by Zotero developers - and I think it's both sensible and preferable for the vast majority of users - and so it makes sense that that's the workflow they're encouraging with their design decisions.
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