Make chapter entries from book entry

Crissov
Quite often, I add a yet unread book to my bibliography, only to find out later that all I need are one or two of its chapters (or sections, parts, articles or whatever). Still, I’d like to keep the entry for possible later use.

For the chapter citation, I can clone the existing book entry, change it to book-part (or whatever it is in English), dismiss the warning, add a title and select or add the correct author, manually link both entries.

I wish this was all simplified to one step “Add chapter to book” in the context menu of book (and similar) entries. This should, if possible at all, also generate crossrefs in biblatex export.
  • bwiernik
    While I don't think this will ever be incorporated as a base feature of Zotero, it should be fairly easily accomplished with a plugin. You might try requesting help from a developer in the plugins area of this forum to take on programming such a package.
  • milene.cha
    I second this request. It would be very helpful to have it as a Zotero base feature.
  • MarvinP
    VERY helpful, indeed!
  • cpsyctc
    Another vote for this.
  • d.bobak
    And another vote for the feature!
  • JamesSolomonRounce
    And another vote!
  • zuphilip
    It is possible to change the itemType of an book into a bookSection. Then, a title will be mapped into bookTitle. Shouldn't the author consistently been maped to bookAuthor?

    However, you can use this standard functionality of zotero together with "dublicate entry" to achive exactly what you describe here.
  • adamsmith
    the request is to turn this into a single step, which would be possible, but also a GUI problem.
  • zuphilip
    Okay, I see. And why is the mapping currently
    • book -> bookSection
    • title -> bookTitle
    • author -> author (and not bookAuthor)?
  • adamsmith
    I think mainly because book authors are so rare. The expectation/experience would be that this is mostly editors, which would be the same for book and book section. But if there's a lot of interest in also moving over authors to book authors, I don't think that'd be hard.
  • Bart_De_Roy
    Another related feature I've considered, is the automated creation of book/document sections, based on pdf bookmarks.
    I've always really desired to relate "child items" to their parent item differently. It would be better to preserve the 'relate' feature for linking items that are not necessarily physically related in a collection such as colloquial publications, articles in journals, chapters in books etc. A single-level hierarchy would be enough I suppose; like an attachment, the child items could be collapsed into their parent.
  • zuphilip
    ( I asked about the original feature request in the zutilo plugin: https://github.com/willsALMANJ/Zutilo/issues/27 )
  • skenworthy
    edited December 11, 2014
    I would also add my voice to this Feature. A great number of the articles I use are in edited collections: one (or more) person(s) Edits the volume, but each article is written by a different author. In my citation, I need to cite the article but also the book that it comes from. It would be so much easier to add in the book once, then have that info automatically added in each time I add a separate article entry. As it is, unless I'm missing something, there's only a place to put in the "author" under "Book Section", but not the Editor of the book.
  • bwiernik
    If you click on the word "Author" next to a name, you can change it to Editor or other creator types.
  • John_muccigrosso
    +1 on this.

    I like that the book editors (almost(?) always the case when you've got separate authors for the chapters/sections) remain as they are.

    I'm not clear on why this is difficult. Aren't these the steps:

    1. Duplicate entry.
    2. Change type to book section from book.

    Then the rest depends on the particular item.

    It seems like a minor time savings, but I find myself doing it a lot.
  • adamsmith
    The difficulty is entirely GUI implementation. The coding part to automate those two steps is trivial.
  • John_muccigrosso
    For the GUI, I'd suggest something under the + (Add new item) button. The contextual menu is also a good place, given that "duplicate" is in there already.

    Zotero's got way too little in its main menus, which I assume is part of its legacy as a FireFox add-on, but that's a whole other topic...
  • adamsmith
    Right, the problem is that both of those places are already overcrowded, especially the context menu. Remember that this is a feature that many people won't use.
  • John_muccigrosso
    I think we have very different definitions of overcrowded. :-) I don't find Zotero's menus at all crowded.

    My + button has 8 items total, with 3 separators. I don't think that's a lot for a menu.

    Ditto the contextual menu. Right now in Safari, a right-click gets me a menu with 14 items and 3 separators. That's one less than Zotero's and 2 less than what I get in the Finder. And I've got Zutilo, Zotfile and Quicklook in there, which means that the stock version has fewer items.

    One man's opinion, of course, but I think there's plenty of room.

    Besides that, if a user knows enough to go to the contextual menu, they can handle another item. That might be a bit of a Mac perspective, where contextual menus often duplicate functionality or provide more "power user" type stuff.
  • zuphilip
    As mentioned above it looks like this feature will be implemented in Zutilo. Just give the developer a little time (and buy him a beer afterwards:)...
  • John_muccigrosso
    I'd still argue this should be in Zotero and not a plug-in. Basic functionality for me.
  • SiavashRohani
    Has anyone been able to find a workaround for this? Is it really not possible to add this function to Zotero?
  • adamsmith
    Did you see the note about Zutilo?
  • SiavashRohani
    I did see the note about Zutilo, tried getting it with Firefox, but it doesn't allow me to download it ("As of 2018, Zutilo updates are no longer published to addons.mozilla.org. To receive future updates, please install the zutilo.xpi from Zutilo's GitHub releases page to receive future updates.") I still cannot download it "because it has not been verified."
    Is there anyway this feature will be incorporated in Zotero itself?

    The problem shows itself especially when you want to cite from the "Introduction" chapter of many books and you get so many entries with the same title. If there was a way to connect them to the actual book, this problem would easily be resolved.
  • bwiernik
    Right-click on this link and choose Save As. Then in Zotero (not Firefox), click Tools - Add-ons and drag the .xpi file into the window that pops up.
    https://github.com/willsALMANJ/Zutilo/releases/download/v3.0.3/zutilo.xpi
  • adamsmith
    Probably not going to be part of Zotero any time soon, no.

    Zutilo works in Zotero, you're just trying to install it in the wrong place: It's a Zotero add-on, not a Firefox add-on, so you have to install it in Zotero. Installation instructions are here: https://github.com/willsALMANJ/Zutilo#installation

    You can use the "Related" function to associated chapters with books -- it's not quite as elegant as having them grouped under the book, but it works pretty well. Zutilo does that automatically in its book chapter functionality.
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