Upgrade Storagehow to correctly enter a review
I found an old thread from 2006 on this topic. But rather than necro that -- which is likely against policy -- I thought I'd start a new one to ask a very basic question...
How do I format book reviews, CD reviews etc. in Zotero? I work in musicology and both are an absolute requirement.
I would expect review to be an item type but it is not. I would expect something to map onto the CSL item types "review" and "review-book", but, again, apparently not.
So far I have been abusing the Title field, but this is unsustainable. For one, a book review might often have its own title, separate from the information on the books it is reviewing.
Perhaps I am missing something?
How do I format book reviews, CD reviews etc. in Zotero? I work in musicology and both are an absolute requirement.
I would expect review to be an item type but it is not. I would expect something to map onto the CSL item types "review" and "review-book", but, again, apparently not.
So far I have been abusing the Title field, but this is unsustainable. For one, a book review might often have its own title, separate from the information on the books it is reviewing.
Perhaps I am missing something?
I think review is still generally planned as an item type for Zotero once the long-overdue revamp is going to happen, but not sure. It's somewhat tricky, since reviews can appear in all types of media (different types of articles, broadcasts, blogs, webpages).
If not an item type, though, then definitely the title of the reviewed item, though, which together with the regular title then allows you to create full references. That, too is implemented in Chicago Manual styles, I believe. To work with Zotero, you need to hack this by entering
{:reviewed-title: This is an example title} into the Extra field. Not a great solution, but all we have right now. (If you want to, you can use the same hack to force a different item type, but that's not implemented in any existing styles, so of questionable value).
If anyone has an implementation in CSL that I can hack into my style file, I'd be thankful. My own skills in that regard are not up to the task.
Reviews may be tricky, but they are essential. It would be sure good if Zotero had a page in the documentation on Limitations and Restrictions, where such things were mentioned explicitly.
Obviously this won't work automatically in a customized style if you don't have it implemented, but the variable mapping is universal, so that _will_ work in any style as long as you make sure you're using the right variable names.
What would make this less of a hack is if "reviewed-title" was a built-in field. But also more of the templates would need support for it, since I can't see too many users doing what I just did!
I realise, however, that this would not be a compete solution. For one, it doesn't help with reviews of more than one title. For that scenario it makes more sense to give each reviewed item its own entry (which they likely should have anyway, from a research point of view). Then one master "review" record can point to as many review targets as need be.
One new field, one new record type, and one new relationship type "review of" manages the whole mess. And supports any sort of review.
The problem is inherent in the CSL format. A new field needs its own little macro to act as a formatter, and then these macros get used in different ways depending on the citation style. The issue is that macros are not shareable between files, and so can't be re-used.
I've been using the visual editor at citationstyles.org. It's a syntax checker with lots of limitations. (For one, it strips out all my comments and whitespace.) Someone needs to build an actual visual editor where elements of the bibliography or citation can be edited in place. And where components can be re-used. That might speed up even repetitive tasks across different CSL files.
Just some blue-sky thinking. Obviously this stuff doesn't make itself!
Also, most styles don't have support for all (or even a majority of) item types and most science and medical journals don't really cite much beyond half a dozen types, so while, yes, this is a bit of a problem, it's much, much smaller than you make it out to be.
The fact that the visual editor strips out comments is indeed unfortunate, but we don't have anyone who's even properly maintaining that, so not much to do. (FWIW, I find the Zotero style editor in conjunction with a validator more useful).
My experience comes from the different humanities formats I have used, which are a jungle! I am not surprised that science is more organised.
I didn't even know Zotero had a style editor. Will check that out.