Suppression of URLs for books and conferecne papers

stevem250
Hi,

The option in Zotero to suppress URLs for journals, magazines etc. where page numbers are present is really useful. However, it would be even better if that could be extended to cover books and conference papers too.

Example rationale: I access a book or conference paper in electronic form via the online library at my institution. The URL is useful to me (so I want Zotero to store it), but it is not useful to anyone outside of that institution.

Thanks,

Steve
  • aurimas
    Is the URL not useful because it's proxied? Can you post it here? For an online reference, you should include the URL of where the full text is located even if it's behind a paywall. I know that right now we don't drop the proxy on import, which makes this a bit problematic, but we'll be fixing that shortly (it won't affect existing entries in your library though). You could do it manually in the mean time.
  • stevem250
    Hi Aurimas,

    Thanks for the rapid response.

    I'm thinking partly of stuff that goes via proxies and is a behind a paywall, but also stuff we might host locally that has a non-publicly accessible URL. So, a colleague writes a book or paper, I access it electronically locally, but that's no use to anyone else but me. It's not that common, but it does happen.

    More generally, I'm also thinking of cases where there is parity between paper and electronic copies. While I agree in principle that we should be referring readers to the actual version we used, if this was not a use case people wanted, why is it already supported for papers and magazines?

    I've modified my CSL file to handle this at the moment, so it's not urgent, but I'm thinking this might help people who are not CSL literate.

    Thanks,

    Steve
  • aurimas
    stuff we might host locally that has a non-publicly accessible URL. So, a colleague writes a book or paper, I access it electronically locally, but that's no use to anyone else but me. It's not that common, but it does happen.
    In that case, it's probably best to maintain the link as an attachment (purely for convenience) than as metadata in the URL field.
    More generally, I'm also thinking of cases where there is parity between paper and electronic copies. While I agree in principle that we should be referring readers to the actual version we used, if this was not a use case people wanted, why is it already supported for papers and magazines?
    Don't quote me on this (someone more knowledgeable will probably chime in), but the idea here is that if you're giving a page number, those page numbers refer to the physical copy of the article. They're generally meaningless for an electronic resource. It's not like you mean page 125-130 of the PDF when you're citing a journal article. The PDFs for journal articles are usually identical (in content) to the printed material.
  • adamsmith
    I think the main concern would be that I wouldn't know how the option to suppress URLs for books etc. would be sufficiently customizable to make this useful.
    If a URL is too specific to be useful to anyone but you, I agree that the way to go would be to just remove it from the URL field and include it as a link instead.
  • stevem250
    Hi,

    Thanks again for the rapid responses.

    I understand your concerns, but this must be a useful feature as it already exists for journals, magazines etc. (see the Zotero -> Cog -> Preferences -> Styles tab -> Citation Options). All I'm suggesting is this be extending to cover similar publications.

    I can't see how having this option for journals etc. is useful/permitted and for conference papers we should have a workaround. The two publications are almost identical in form, style and use.

    > I wouldn't know how the option to suppress URLs for books etc.
    > would be sufficiently customizable to make this useful.

    The current option is either on or off, so this is not customisable at all. I can't, say, supply URLs for magazines with page numbers but not journals (unless you delve into the CSL, which this option seems aimed at preventing the need for). No one is forcing the user to enable it. If they want more flexible configuration, then it's CSL all the way :-)

    Best regards,

    Steve
  • adamsmith
    oh wait - for conference papers I actually agree with this. Same for book chapters. Maybe I just misunderstood you.
    I'm fine with not displaying URLs for anything that has a page range. I just don't want to extend it to books and other items with no page range.

    The problem with extending this to books is that we either need another option -- at which point this gets a bit complicated -- or we need to adjust hundreds of citation styles, which I'm not willing to do.

This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.

Sign In or Register to comment.