How to import citation data of European Union official documents?

ikankare
As a researcher in the field of european public administration, the official documentation produced by EU institutions are an essential part of my data. Unfortunately, I have not yet figured out how to import the citation data of these documents into Zotero.

As an example, a "COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE COUNCIL
AND THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, Common Actions for Growth and Employment:
The Community Lisbon Programme" at http://ec.europa.eu/growthandjobs/pdf/COM2005_330_en.pdf
  • konradz
    It's good to know that there are some other Zotero users concerned with European public administration and policy :) What exactly is your focus, maybe we should create on of those "reference groups". Coming back to your question, there is no one single way that you could import EU legislations, as on principle that will be of different format (proceedings, acts n so on). From my experience, reports found through Google Scholar are in huge majority saved as journal articles, changing format to report usually helps. I didn't have major problems with importing conference proceedings. Frankly speaking, I would love to see translation filter for EUR-Lex :D
  • jrsnape
    I'd like to see this too - resurrecting an old thread...
  • adamsmith
    edited June 19, 2013
    like to see what exactly?
    For EUR-Lex, see my comment here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2814/5/which-site-translators-would-you-like-to-see-take-2/#Item_11
  • jrsnape
    Sorry - bit of a nebulous comment. Yes, what I would like is a EUR-Lex translator. I should put some effort into figuring out what should go where. I guess I was kind of hoping it had been done (a bit lazy - sorry - just holding out hope that I could get a load of EU directives into Zotero quickly)
  • fbennett
    This should be a priority for support in MLZ. I'll put it on the TODO list (but would be delighted to find it's been done by the time I get to it!).
  • krevad
    I need this too. While I have dabbled with translators before, I've only done easy scraping translators (using the framework). EUR-lex is a different beast.

    However, I found this project, a node.js-based utility to convert EUR-lex documents and metadata to JSON. It is at least somewhat of a starting point.

    https://github.com/lobbyplag/eurlex-js
  • krevad
    I just found that the EU launched a new version of EUR-Lex (Google still ranks old EUR-Lex higher).

    http://new.eur-lex.europa.eu/

    This new EUR-Lex seems more well behaved, and is probably easier to write a simple scraper translator for.
  • fbennett
    I could take a look at this now. I'll probably have questions about the document numbers and other metadata in the pages, and about customary cite forms so that we don't miss essential details.

    Which of the document categories would be a good starting point?
  • fbennett
    edited August 8, 2013
    Looking at the "Legislation" area of the new site, I am again amazed at the effort and care that legal archive projects put into visual organization, while completely neglecting to provide meaningful structured metadata. It really makes you wonder what they are thinking.

    Can someone familiar with this category of resources tell what the "OJ 10" in the following reference string means?

    OJ 10, 21/07/1953, p. 154–154 (DE, FR, IT, NL)

    There will be other questions to follow, but this would at least give a clue as to whether parsing these records is going to be feasible.
  • RintzeRintze
    Issue 10 of the "Official Journal", see http://eur-lex.europa.eu/JOMonth.do?year=1953&month=10
  • krevad
    edited August 9, 2013
    As a self-serving legal researcher I would suggest starting with EU case law as it is pretty straightforward to cite, yet something that is frequently done.

    You need:
    case number | case name | [year] | report abbreviation | first page

    to make an OSCOLA compliant note:
    Case C–556/07 Commission v France [2009] OJ C102/8

    This would be the source for that case:
    http://new.eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62007CA0556

    There is actually a logic to the Celex numbers:
    http://new.eur-lex.europa.eu/content/help/celex_number/celex_number_intro.html
  • fbennett
    @rintze: Thanks for tracking that down.

    It looks like screen-scraping this stuff would be very tough. There is not much uniformity in the presentation, and with both multiple item types and multiple languages, we could find ourselves heading down a rabbit hole. There may be hope though ...

    Rob Richards and Stephane Cottin over on Twitter have pointed out two APIs for the EUR-Lex collections:

    http://api.epdb.eu/
    and
    http://new.eur-lex.europa.eu/content/help/web-service/web-service-general.html

    The former offers unrestricted access, but the data is only current to 2012. The latter is up-to-date but requires registration and an API key.

    If we can work out a way to retrieve entries via the latter API from items on the site, things would be vastly simplified, and we would get better quality metadata. The translator would need to be given a hidden pref where the user registers their personal key for API access, but that may be a reasonable burden.
  • usernameka
    Hi,
    i do not quite understand from this, basically can someone please tell me how citation in text and in final reference list should look like in APA for this and how to make it in Zotero??

    Recommendation 2006/962/EC of the European Parliament and The Council of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning

    O.J. L 394/10

    http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32006H0962&from=EN
  • fbennett
    edited January 4, 2015
    If APA doesn't specify a form for this, a good place to check would be OSCOLA, which is both authoritative and freely available: http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/publications/oscola.php (haven't checked to see whether Council reports are covered explicitly, but there should be guidance on similar references).

    As for how to make it happen in Zotero, something could be coded into a style for the time being. Proper support for legal referencing is going to require some special facilities in the processor, which should come on stream later this year; in the meantime, we're basically dealing with workarounds.
  • adamsmith
    (APA says to use bluebook for legal cites)
  • usernameka
    OK, tnx.
    I asked the same Library in Maastriht

    The answer is:

    Dear ....,

    The APA manual 6th edition says the following about legal references.

    Treat references to legal materials like references to works with no author; that is, in text, cite materials such as court cases, statutes, and legislation by the first few words

    of the reference and the year (see Appendix 7. 1 for the format of text citations and references for legal materials) .

    Appendix 7.1 starts at page 216 of the manual. Our library owns a copy of the APA Style Guide.

    cid:image002.jpg@01CD22F3.3E5900B0

    UB-Endnote
    Department Education & Research Support / University Library
    j.franssen@maastrichtuniversity.nl


    Grote Looiersstraat 17, 6211 JH Maastricht
    P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands
    T +31 43 388 5105


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