Book Reviews: Another item type?

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  • for all types of authors you need to use
    <names variable="reviewed-author">
    <name/>
    </names>
    http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#names
    That will now work (since Zotero 3.0.10 I believe)

    look at e.g. how the author is rendered in the style as an example.
    Let me know if that's enough info or if you need more detail.
  • ahh, thankyou!

    That worked perfectly. I have a few more questions about the difference and upgrade to 1.0.1, as the template is based on 1.0 and seems to use the older text variable tags for authors, and also finding disued macros as I am editing in a hybrid way (using both the visual editor and the xml code where the visual is weaker), but will not drag this off topic, and will search before starting a new thread with those questions :)

    Thanks again.
  • Hello,
    I started using Zotero just two months ago and I just love it! I have recommended it to everyone in school and we just don't know how we did not know about it earlier! You guys have done a magnificent job.

    Now, I have started writing my thesis and although Zotero has done things much easier, the only thing that has caused me troubles is the lack of an Item Type "Book Review." I see that since 2006 there are people with the same situation and I also see that adamsmith said in November 2012 that such field would be available in the next major release. Yet Zotero 4 is here and this has not been added.

    In light of this, I have just two questions:
    1) When will the feature be added?
    2) What is a simple workaround for people who have no idea about programming but who do not want to transform the citation to plain text?

    Thanks for your answers!
  • The plan at the moment is to introduce these changes in version 4.2 (I don't have an actual time estimate though)

    The workaround depends on the style you are using (i.e. the way you want this displayed). We can better assist you with this if you give us an example of how you want the reference to appear.
  • Thanks for your prompt response.

    My school works with Turabian 7th, so a book review in an online journal should look like this:

    Bibliography:
    Marvin K., Mayers. Review of Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai: A Critique of Idols, by Kosuke Koyama. Journal of Psychology and Theology 14, no. 4 (December 1, 1986): 357-58, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0000550909&site=ehost-live (accessed September 8, 2013).


    Footnote:
    Mayers Marvin K. review of Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai: A Critique of Idols, by Kosuke Koyama, Journal of Psychology and Theology 14, no. 4 (December 1, 1986): 357-58, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0000550909&site=ehost-live (accessed September 8, 2013).


    Any help will be really appreciated :)
  • I think that's actually possible already, no Zotero changes necessary, though it feels a bit hackish because we'd just declare something a review whenever it has a reviewed author. It's not implemented in any style, though.

    The only thing is that you can't currently have is a review with a separate title as in
    David Kamp, “Deconstructing Dinner,” review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, New York Times, April 23, 2006, Sunday Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/books/review/23kamp.html.

    The way to enter this at the moment would be to use journal article put
    Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai: A critique of idols
    into the title field. The rest should be self-explanatory. I can have a look at implementing this in Chicago style (which should be good enough for you as Turabian follows the same rules mostly), but won't be super quick
  • Hello adamsmith.

    Thanks for your response. How should I do it then? The book review I need does not have a different name. I have already included the fields "Author" and "Reviewed author" in Zotero and the Item Type "Journal Article," still this is what I get:

    Mayers, Marvin K. “Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai: A Critique of Idols.” Journal of Psychology & Theology 14, no. 4 (December 1, 1986): 357–358.

    The "Review of" and the "by [reviewed author]" do not show up. How could I do it?
  • As I say "it's not implemented in any style (...)I can have a look at implementing this in Chicago style (which should be good enough for you as Turabian follows the same rules mostly), but won't be super quick"
  • Ah OK. I would really appreciate it if you would do it, or if you instruct me how to do it I could give it a try. Thank you so much :)

    I hope 4.2 really includes this feature, Book reviews are very important in my field (theology).

    Have a great day :)
  • please add "syllabus" or "course materials" or some category that we can use to cite a web page that relates to an academic course.
  • Lex- What citation style specifies a seperate format for these documents? Can you not use one of Zotero's more generic item types for these "unpublished" documents?
  • OK, the Chicago Full-note style now supports book reviews. Simply use the title of the book as "Title" and add the book author as "Reviewed Author". I'm waiting to push this out across the CMoS styles to hear back from some people trying this out to see that it works, so please leave feedback if you do.
  • I tried the Chicago Full-Note style and it works great! Now, I know it may be a hassle for you, but if you could implement it in Turabian too I would really appreciate it (Just because I am not sure there are indeed differences between the two)

    Thank you so much adamsmith, you have really helped me! :)
  • Looks great so far, but it gets complicated: when the review is of a translated or edited work, how to deal with the "reviewed editor" and/or "reviewed translator" ?
  • edited May 13, 2014
    Thanks for working on this addition! Book reviews are fairly important in my discipline (archaeology), so it will be nice to be able to properly cite them with Zotero!

    There are a couple things that would make this much more complete, though. Would it be possible to add fields for the publication info for the book as well as for the article? E.g. Book Place, Book Publisher, Book Date. If I just put them in with the title, they get italicized along with the book title.

    Also, it would be helpful if it would also display the series a book belongs to (very common in my field).

    In the current system, this is what the review looks like in the bibliography (minus the italics):

    Szudy, M. Jamie. Review of Den Dolch betreffend: Typologie der Stichwaffen in Ägypten von der prädynastischen Zeit bis zur 3. Zwischenzeit, by Susanne Petschel. Wiener Zeitschrift Für Die Kunde Des Morgenlandes 102 (2012): 369–71.

    But ideally, I would like it to look something like this (again, the book and journal titles should be in italics):

    Szudy, M. Jamie. Review of Susanne Petschel, Den Dolch betreffend: Typologie der Stichwaffen in Ägypten von der prädynastischen Zeit bis zur 3. Zwischenzeit (Philippika 36). Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2011. Wiener Zeitschrift Für Die Kunde Des Morgenlandes 102 (2012): 369–71.

    So the format would be something like:

    [reviewer name]. Review of [reviewed author], [book title in italics] ([series] [series number]). [book place]: [book publisher], [book date]. [publication in italics] [publication vol. number] ([date]): [pages].

    Do you know if there is a way to implement this? Thanks!
  • certainly not possible at the moment, unless you include the full book info in the title field (you can add italics using https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/rich_text_bibliography ).
    Is that actually required in a citation style?
  • Thanks for the tip! It is a pretty common format for book reviews in the humanities (or at least in those concerning archaeology). It's not enough to just give the book's author and title, they want the publication info as well. So if there is a way to ingetrate it more effectively, I'm sure many people would find it very helpful!

    I used the italic tags, as you suggested, and moved the book author to the Title field from the Reviewed Author field thus:

    Title: Review of Susanne Petschel, <i>Den Dolch betreffend: Typologie der Stichwaffen in Ägypten von der prädynastischen Zeit bis zur 3. Zwischenzeit</i> (Philippika 39). Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2011.

    It displays perfectly in the International Organization style, though in the Chicago style, the title has quotation marks around it that would need to be removed. Fortunately, I am using the International Organization style now, so that works for me - thanks again!
  • edited June 27, 2014
    OK, the Chicago Full-note style now supports book reviews. Simply use the title of the book as "Title" and add the book author as "Reviewed Author". I'm waiting to push this out across the CMoS styles to hear back from some people trying this out to see that it works, so please leave feedback if you do.
    Thank you. Tested this with pandoc. Findings:
    • The style does seem to format both "article-journal" if containing "reviewed-author", and "review" as reviews. Good.
    • All types are rendered like article-magazine or article-newspaper, though, i.e., a full date is included, but volume, number, and pages are missing. This should be fixed since for reviews in academic journals this information is essential.
    • prefix=&quot;review of &quot; is hardcoded into the style. I'd like to suggest introducing a new CSL term here.
    • "by " is missing before the reviewed author(s). The CSL term "reviewed-author" should be used here.
    • The title of the reviewed work should be capitalized (only in English of course, as for other titles).
    • If there is a "title", a "reviewed-author", but no "reviewed-title", it's probably safe to assume that "title" is meant to be the title of the reviewed work; that's what the style currently does, and this works in pandoc, too.
    • If there is a "reviewed-title" but no "title", the "reviewed-title" is not rendered. This should be fixed.
    • If the review has a title of its own, i.e., both "title" and "reviewed-title" exist, both should be rendered, as in this CMoS example (16e, 14.215):
      2. David Kamp, “Deconstructing Dinner,” review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, New York Times, April 23, 2006, Sunday Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/books/review/23kamp.html.
    • Including editor(s) and translator(s) as in a CMoS example, "by Hermano Vianna, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen" is probably impossible in the current CSL framework -- unless, that is, one uses the string "Hermano Vianna, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen" as a literal author. Any better ideas?
    • A pandoc test file is at https://gist.github.com/anonymous/2b4db6aa44c45e51a35a
    I'm looking forward to support for "review" in other Chicago styles as well.
  • I did add support for reviews several months ago to some of the other Chicago files, though I can't remember which ones; I might sit down at some point and verify that everything has been synchronized.

    I really am mystified by the issue you note of where 'by' is coming from when the reviewed author is inserted; can anyone shed light on this?
  • If you were referring to a stray "by" that appeared after the reviewed author's name in Chicago Author-Date and APA styles, I only recently picked up on the issue. It was caused by a bug in the processor, which has been fixed in the latest release (tag 1.1.9).
  • Is there any way to take whatever code was changed in the Chicago Full-note style (in order to enable the addition of "reviewed author" to change the source to a book review), and add it to a custom style? I'm working with a self-modified author-date style, "International Politics." Would be great to be able to adapt it to cite book reviews in this style as well.
  • I will add my voice here to the call for improving the way Zotero handles reviews, and also my thanks for all that has been done so far. I'm a librarian who works with faculty and students in several social sciences and humanities subjects (history, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, philosophy), and really, all of them need to cite book reviews sometimes.

    I'm glad the Reviewed Author has been added to the Author dropdown for the Journal Article, Magazine Article, and Newspaper Article, item types. It would still be helpful to also have that option in Web Page and Blog Post item types, but the item types already implemented will cover most cases. It would be helpful to have all of the styles that come "out of the box" with Zotero format book-review titles in whatever way those styles ask for, so that whenever Zotero sees a reviewed author, those styles add the "review of" text automatically as well, or do whatever those other styles do with reviews. MLA, for instance, wants "Rev. of" instead of "Review of."
  • Hi folks,
    Jumping in here a year later to ask if 5.0 will integrate book reviews as an item type. I think of this all as magic, and I have no idea how the magic works, but I'm editing a bibliography *full* of book reviews, and desperately wishing for a Chicago style book review type.

    Do wishes come true?

    Rudy
  • Hi All,
    My fingers are crossed, also. Any chance of including a book review item type?
  • I'm generally still open to the idea, I'm just not sure how much it'll help:
    Book reviews appear in journals, magazines, newspapers, and as per the above increasingly in other sources like blogs, webpages, podcasts presumably. They're all going to be cited differently, so I'm not sure how much a dedicated item type would actually help?
  • edited May 2, 2017
    I can't speak for others, but it would help me in a few ways:

    1. Categorisation: I like to be able to delineate between journal articles and reviews when assessing the metrics of my sources;

    2. Duplicates: I currently have three review articles reviewing the same book. The only common entries are 'reviewed authors' and 'title' - yet they are all listed as a single duplicate (despite the author, year etc. being different). In my experience, review articles are the most likely entires to have false duplicates. An item type that provided an exemption for this, or a field in the item type that was exempt from this false categorisation would be great;

    3. Some review articles have different names to the publication being reviewed. A type similar to book section would manage this well (I currently use the journal type). This way the 'book title' field could be used or not, depending on the article - whilst also allowing for a publication field;

    4. Ease of use: every time I enter review article, I need to go through and remind myself of the nomenclature I've used so that they are distinct. I'm all about simplifying processes, and this would help :-)

    As for review articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers. They could conceivably all be managed using general terms. The 'publication title' for example could be the journal/magazine/newspaper name. The volume, issue, and page numbers would work for all three etc. Whilst I agree that the other source types you mentioned may require a bit of creativity - the former three types are probably the most common.
  • @adamsmith Do you know if there is workaround available for this? My biggest issue is that it creates a mess in my duplicates.
  • On the CSL level we do have a review and review-book item type. I don't know what Zotero will decide about this -- I remain a bit skeptical for the reason I stated in 2017 but I'm also not going to go to bat against such an item type.

    In terms of workarounds, you can turn an item into a book review for CSL purposes by using type: review-book in the Extra field, but I don't think any style actually does anything with that. Moreover, this or any other workaround wouldn't help with duplicates.

    Duplicates in particular is just something that Zotero needs to fix in general. It needs to be possible to mark items as not duplicate and there has been an open ticket for this for years.
  • Book review Zotero question: Is it possible to add a "title" or "reviewed work" category to a book review? I've got quite a few book reviews that have titles.

    One example is this: Jonothan Logan, "'A Strange New Quantum Ethics,'" review of Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn, American Scientist, July-August 2001.

    I can't seem to get "A Strange New Quantum Ethics" to be added to my citation. I tried using the "reviewed-title" CSL variable in the extra field but it doesn't seem to be working for me. Is there any way to make this work?
  • I'm not sure we currently implement this in any other style than perhaps APA, but in general using reviewed-title: Copenhagen in Extra (and "A strange new quantum ethics" in the title field) would give CSL the right data to format this.
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