Spectral "Section" value
I'm new to Zotero, so I have just acquainted myself with all the discussions on this forum regarding legal citations - specifically, statutes. After much experimentation, I've managed to get the Word plugin to spit out citations like this:
Mich. Comp. Laws § 380.1507, 1976.
I do this by putting everything except the date in the "Name of Act" field. The date goes in the date field. The resulting cite is not strictly correct; that would be:
Mich. Comp. Laws § 380.1507 (1976).
...but it's close enough for my purposes.
Here's the problem: when I first input my statutes, I tried to make each record as complete as possible by typing (yes, Zotero didn't recognize the Michigan code website as statutes, alas) as much data into all the fields as possible. Now I have to delete that data, or the plugin inserts it in odd ways. While deleting it is heartbreaking, the problem is that every once in a while, after I've deleted the "Section" data, it nevertheless is inserted in my new footnote. How can this be? What piece of code is holding onto these ghostly section numbers?
Any ideas? (I considered MLZ to make all this more straightforward, but since I generally work on interdisciplinary teams, I discarded that idea for fear of confusing my social scientist colleagues' citations.)
Thanks all, for any ideas you can contribute.
Mich. Comp. Laws § 380.1507, 1976.
I do this by putting everything except the date in the "Name of Act" field. The date goes in the date field. The resulting cite is not strictly correct; that would be:
Mich. Comp. Laws § 380.1507 (1976).
...but it's close enough for my purposes.
Here's the problem: when I first input my statutes, I tried to make each record as complete as possible by typing (yes, Zotero didn't recognize the Michigan code website as statutes, alas) as much data into all the fields as possible. Now I have to delete that data, or the plugin inserts it in odd ways. While deleting it is heartbreaking, the problem is that every once in a while, after I've deleted the "Section" data, it nevertheless is inserted in my new footnote. How can this be? What piece of code is holding onto these ghostly section numbers?
Any ideas? (I considered MLZ to make all this more straightforward, but since I generally work on interdisciplinary teams, I discarded that idea for fear of confusing my social scientist colleagues' citations.)
Thanks all, for any ideas you can contribute.
Easiest way around this is to delete the old citation and re-insert it, making sure you select it from "My Library" and note from "Cited" (in the red quick format Word plugin that is)
I was deleting and re-inserting citations, but I was doing it from the red quick format. I'll try it using My Library instad. Many thanks!
@aurimas - well, real legal support is only possible in MLZ. It would likely be possible to find a slightly better way of dealing with the data to get to correct citations, that's what I've done when people ask me to do legal styles in plain Zotero—but it'd still be clumsy and likely require style customizing.
The problem isn't so much this citation, but that different laws require different citations. You can check some of the examples on fbennett's page.
It may be worthwhile to store references in Zotero for note-taking convenience, but on the citation side it might be faster to just write the legal citations into the document by hand.