Item Type, not entry Working Paper.

hillinger
Under Item Type there is no entry for Working Paper. For an economist this category is quite important. For example NBER WPs or SSRN WPs.
  • ajlyon
    And the "Report" type can't work for you?
  • hillinger
    No, "Report" does not show a series number. The working paper series in economics are all numbered.
  • bdarcus
    So the solution isn't necessarily a new type; it could also be modifying an existing type (report and/or document).
  • adamsmith
    actually, Report works perfectly well for working papers in economics, I use it for NBER and IZA all the time.
    The way to enter this is "NBER Working Paper" in the "report type" field and the number in the "report number" field.
    Not many styles account specifically for reports, though, so in many cases it won't show up.
    If you're using a specific style and have instructions on how working papers should look I'd be happy to add them.
  • mibigo
    I don't know if this fit this post, but it is certainly true that there are many working papers or just papers which do not fit any of the existing item types; e.g: many papers in the the subject filed of foreign affairs, or economics, as suggested by hillinger, should deserve an item on their own; take as an example the following from Carnegie Endowment http://carnegieendowment.org/files/brotherhood_success.pdf
    it'a a paper but not a conference paer, nor a report (which should be in librarianship a documnt ssued by an Institution as a result of its reporting activity, eg. report of the courtt of auditors on....) nor it is just a document (the document is very similar to a report froma definition point of view, e.g a working document of the European Commission is a document) and in any case the document doesnnot provide the number of pages, nor a series field. It is not just a website, because these kind papers have a number of pages, a publisher, sometimes even an series name and numbers, although they are published only online; hence I think that an item type like "working paper" or just paper providing a publisher field, a series number, number of pages, etc... would match many of the documents that are issued by think tanks, universities, etc..

    best regards
    Michele
  • adamsmith
    I'm a political scientists/political economist. I cite working papers all the time, using the report option, without any issues.
    I realize that working papers aren't reports in the librarianship definition of the term, but they are individually published items, usually published by an institution that have an additional specification such as NBER Working Paper 12345 (typically report type and report number), so for the purpose of citations the are equivalent to reports.
    I'm not aware of any citation requirements that can't be met using report for working papers (although reports/working papers are not implemented properly in many existing styles).

    Treating working papers as reports isn't, by the way, a Zotero idiosyncrasy. The Econpapers archive, for example, puts a type="technical_report" meta tag on working papers.
  • mibigo
    You are probably right, from a citational point of view it doesn't change anything, but from the point of view of the organization of my references it does; Anyhow I can live with that, thanks.

    Do you know bt the way, if massive editing (always risky I know) are possibile in Zotero? I mean for example, changing one field for multiple records, e.g. the item type; or adding the same tag fro multiple records?
  • adamsmith
    We recommend tags for organization by finer-grained item types. Color coded tags (think gmail) will be implemented in Zotero 3.5.

    Batch editing isn't possible through GUI. If you're somewhat code savvy, you may be interested in this:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/client_coding/javascript_api#examplebatch_editing
  • mibigo
    thanks for the hint, will look into it.

    But what you mean by finer-grained item types? sorry I don't know this term
  • adamsmith
    well - if the 20 or so item types provided by Zotero aren't enough you can create however many tags you want to make more detailed distinctions and organize your library - e.g. you can tag different Reports as Working Paper, Gov't Report, IGO Report, NGO Report, Technical Report, thus creating what I would call finer grained organization. That's not a technical term.
  • mibigo
    Now I see, sorry for misunderstanding.

    best regards
  • Markus Austria
    Sorry to reactivate this thread (similar discussion here, btw: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1020/online-working-papers/)

    In a post of Sept. 30, 2011, @adamsmith points out the following:

    "The way to enter this is "NBER Working Paper" in the "report type" field and the number in the "report number" field. Not many styles account specifically for reports, though, so in many cases it won't show up."

    Isn't that a BIG problem? I have just checked how JEPP (see here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/34077/style-request-journal-of-european-public-policy/) handles working papers, and here is a sample citation from one of the articles published in that journal:

    van den Hoven, A. (2002) ‘Interest group influence on trade policy in a multilevel polity: analysing the EU position at the Doha WTO Ministerial Conference’, [i]EUI Working Paper RSC No. 2002/67[/i].

    Generally, I tend to agree with those who advocate a separate item for working papers. As they are becoming an ever more widespread feature of the research community (which serious university doesn't have a working paper series these days!?), I think it would make Zotero more intuitive and lower the adaptation costs for newcomers.

    I do acknowledge, however, that "path-dependency" may thwart any such considerations, as a new item would need to be defined in ALL existing styles to be handled correctly. FWIW, I will hence simply use "Journal Article" as my item type of choice rather than "Report" (in the above example, copying the whole string incl. “No. 2002/67” in the publication field and leaving volume, issue, and pages blank). Adding the URL is optional (I'd rather not as it clutters the references section).

    I can live with the fact that place and publisher are not cited for a working paper. But the working paper TITLE must not be missing, imho.
  • adamsmith
    Isn't that a BIG problem?
    not as much as you'd think, no. In medicine and many other sciences, citing working papers is much less common and explicitly forbidden in many journals, so obviously it's not included in those citation styles. Where the sample citations do provide a template I account for it in citation styles. Where it's missing and is reported I add it.
  • iacobina
    As Markus did more than 7 years ago, I reactivate this thread.
    It IS a HUGE problem, at least in maths and physics. It would be nice to acknowledge it and solve it once and for all.
  • bdarcus
    @iacobina - there's a reasonably long thread here, with solutions.

    Have you read it?

    If yes, what specific input do have?

    I still don't think a new type for this is required.
  • bwiernik
    @iacobina The CSL item type for working papers and preprints, such as documents posted to ArXiV, is 'article' (this is distinct from ‘article-journal')

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