Allow sort by Short Title

dclarke · October 17, 2014

Currently the references that appear in the center screen of the desktop version can be sorted by almost any field EXCEPT "Short title". Why is that? "Short title" is a very handy way to refer to sources in your own writing or when you're sharing Zotero references in a group, and if you can organize references by Short Title then they're easy to find.

It seems the only way to do that now is to make up a short title and input it into the "Extra" field.

adamsmith · October 17, 2014

Well, "short title" is a citeable field and is meant to be used for the short version of an article/book, usually without the subtitle. As such, it doesn't add any value to sorting (because it starts just like title).

Obviously you _can_ use it differently, but I'm not sure Zotero should add it as an option because some people may employ "short title" as a sort of hack. You're certainly the first person to ever request that. (though, admittedly, the costs of doing that are relatively small--the list is super long anyway).

dclarke · October 17, 2014

No, it wouldn't start just like Title at all. If the source is Henry Kissinger, World Order, then it's going to be with the W's in the title list, but the short title (at least in many citation systems) is going to be "Kissinger 2014" (or something like that). The point is that there should be some way for the user to input an abbreviation for the source. This means that I can write a note to myself or others saying "Check out Kissinger 2014" and they can then find it quickly. (It doesn't take a lot more effort to write "Kissinger, World Order", of course, but we can imagine sources where the author and title together, or the title alone, were very long.)

Anyway, I guess I would have thought that the default design would be to let users sort by any field they wanted to sort by, instead of the designers trying to figure out what kind of sorting they think is legitimate and what kind of sorting constitutes a hack. I'm not even sure what you mean by calling it a hack. I think of a hack as a kind of unapproved shortcut to do something you otherwise couldn't. But this isn't a means to some other end. It's an end in itself, and a legitimate one.

Of course, I can use the "Extra" field for this, but that means I can't use the Extra field for anything else.

Thanks for your consideration.

dclarke · October 17, 2014

Or have I misunderstood how "Short Title" is supposed to work?

adamsmith · October 17, 2014

Short Titles are required in many citation styles, especially in the humanities. Chicago Manual is the most typical example. There, they work exactly as I describe: they are the first part of the title.

So the first citation would be, say,

Henry Kissinger, Crisis: The Anatomy of Two Foreign Policy Crises

the second citation would be

Kissinger, Crisis

Where "Crisis" comes from the Short Title field in Zotero.

If you enter anything else into the short title field, you'll get wrong citations in Chicago style (and several others). That may become even more important in the future, as capitalization may depend on the Short Title (in APA style, the subtitle starts with a capital letter, we'd likely determine where that is by using the Short Title).

If you just want to sort by author/date, then using Author first and then year as a secondary sort order would work.

So yes, you're using short title in a way it's not intended to be used to achive something which you find otherwise hard to achieve (though "Extra" would presumably do the job), which is why I call it a hack.

adamsmith · October 17, 2014

(also, of course, "Kissinger 2014" would come up as a result of the quick search bar with default search parameters).

As for:

Anyway, I guess I would have thought that the default design would be to let users sort by any field they wanted to sort by, instead of the designers trying to figure out what kind of sorting they think is legitimate and what kind of sorting constitutes a hack

Well, that assumes that implementing this has no costs--but a longer list makes usage more inconvenient. So, let's say this costs 100,000 users one second, but 1 user saves 10 mins--then implementing it is overall probably a bad idea. So yes, developers do have to make design decisions partly on what's intended and what's common usage. Else you get software with a million options and terrible ergonomics. It's always a trade off and if you want something included, you need to make the case that the trade off is worth it.

dclarke · October 20, 2014

Thanks for your explanation of the "Short Title" field and its function. I see I've been using it the wrong way, and understand why you can't sort by it. But I guess that since I have used quick-and-dirty abbreviations for my sources (to use as placeholders when i write) my entire academic life, I find it hard to believe that I'm alone in this. And Endnote allows me to have a field for this and to sort by it as well, so it's clearly not a crazy thing for bibliographic software to have. So does this function exist somewhere else in Zotero and I'm just missing it?

Thanks,
Don

fbennett · October 20, 2014

If you put the code at the beginning of the Extra field (followed by other notes and things), you can add that as a column in the center panel, and sort by it, as you said. Does that not address the need?

amc · October 21, 2014

This is a bit of a digression from the question of sorting, but it brings up an issue with Short Title. I agree that the automatic population of the Short Title with the title minus the subtitle makes sense. In most cases that's what you'll want to use for short-title citations anyway. But not always.

For example, I've seen the following citation and bibliographic entry from The Journal of Bahá’í Studies, which purports to use MLA:

...[T]he darkness of imitations encompasses the world. (Promulgation 221).

Abdu’l-Bahá. The Promulgation of Universal Peace: Talks Delivered by
‘Abdu’l-Bahá during His Visit to the United States and Canada in 1912.
Comp. Howard MacNutt. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1982.

In this example the short title is merely a descriptive word chosen from the title but is independent of the title/subtitle distinction.

Another example from APA 6th Edition: When a resource has no named author, cite the first few words of the reference entry (usually the title). Use double quotation marks around the title of an article, chapter, or Web page. Italicize the title of a periodical, book, brochure, or report. For example:
The site seemed to indicate support for homeopathic drugs (“Medical Miracles,” 2009).
The brochure argues for homeschooling (Education Reform, 2007).

So the short title is often just one or two key words, especially for lengthy titles, regardless of whether there's a subtitle or not. Now, it's no problem to simply add a Short Title where it hasn't been automatically generated, and to change the autogenerated ones to whatever you'd like. However, will this cause problems if the Short Title field is going to be used to determine subtitle capitalization in APA style?

adamsmith · October 21, 2014

However, will this cause problems if the Short Title field is going to be used to determine subtitle capitalization in APA style?

thanks for pointing this out. We'll make sure it doesn't. This isn't something that'll happen in the next 3 months in any case.

fbennett · October 21, 2014

When the Abbreviation Filter for Zotero (AFZ) is installed, the nickname used to back-reference a cite can be set as a "hereinafter" value in AFZ (independent of the Short Title field in Zotero or MLZ itself).

There is no "hereinafter" value in the CSL 1.0.1 schema, so a style that relied on it would not currently be valid CSL; but it's one way that this one could be handled.