Sort Bibliography into a Pre-1800 and Post-1800 list?

JMachielsen
I've been building my own CSL for the book manuscript I'm working on. I searched the forum and discovered there is currently no way for Zotero to separate primary and secondary sources in the bibliography.

However, I have a possible alternative that would work in my field. I'm just not sure whether it is possible. I'm an early modern (16th, 17th century) historian and quite a number of books on the period have their bibliography split in pre- and post-1800. Would this be possible with Zotero/CSL?

I know a bibliography can be sorted by date, but that's not what I have in mind. I would like the bibliography sorted by author but split automatically in two parts. Any suggestions would be most welcome!
  • adamsmith
    It's not possible to compare dates in CSL, so this won't work, no.
    Maybe there's another way to do this though? If all primary sources have something in the "archive" field, that would be enough to make that work.
    Same if all primary sources have item types they belong to that are exclusive to them.
  • JMachielsen
    Ok. So just to clarify, I would add, say, the number 1 into the archive field for all my primary source documents and then add to the start of the bibliography section of the CSL something like this:

    <sort>
    <key variable="archive" sort="descending"/>
    <key macro="contributor" names-min="3" names-use-first="3"/>
    </sort>

    Thanks again!
  • adamsmith
    That's less stable than what I had in mind. You can test for the presence of a variable. So let's assume only primary sources have anything in the archive field. Then you define a macro based on that, solely for sorting
    <macro name="sort-key">
    <choose>
    <if variable="archive">
    <text value="1"/>
    </if>
    <else>
    <text value="2"/>
    </else>
    <choose>
    </macro>

    and the sort using.

    <sort>
    <key macro="sort-key" sort="descending"/>
    <key macro="contributor" names-min="3" names-use-first="3"/>
    </sort>

    You can make more complex sort keys, e.g. based on item types.
    Here's a write-up:
    http://blogs.eui.eu/zotero/sort-a-bibliography-by-type.html
  • adamsmith
    (obviously, if the archive field isn't exclusive to primary documents, you can use extra (which maps to note in CSL), which presumably won't be used in your bibliography.

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