In "Report" a "Series Editor" not displayed in creator field in list view

maevepotter · April 3, 2012

Why does a Zotero "Report" type not display "Series Editor" under the creator field in the summary list view of all the citations?

I have a person who is an editor of a series of reports, and he is published elsewhere, and should be listed alphabetically with his other publications, not a blank creator field in the list view. In Zotero under Report there is only the option for "series editor" which doesn't seem to show up in the creator field.

Can this be fixed?

aurimas · April 16, 2012

Zotero data model is designed with citations in mind. So generally speaking, an item that is being cited in text should include an author.

From what I learned on these forums, it is quite uncommon to cite a collection of items. This is why there is no item type for Journal, Magazine, Newspaper, etc. A collection of reports falls into the same category. This data model may or may not change in the future, but currently, "Report" type is considered a monograph, which should contain an author.

This thread (particularly the first post), while technical, may be informative: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15636/1/changes-to-fields-and-item-types-for-zotero-31-/

brianhole · December 29, 2015

I've come up against the same issue while referencing reports in my thesis. What I think would fix this for myself and the previous user is to have a creator type of 'Editor' for reports as well as 'Series Editor', and for this to appear under creator (as it does for a book). In my case each report in the series is edited by someone different, so they need to be able to be cited separately, with appropriate attribution. This is very common in fields such as archaeology. It is also common to have one-off reports which are not part of a series, also of course requiring attribution of the editor.

Right now Zotero attributes these reports to 'Anon', which is incorrect. My only workaround at the moment is to change the contributor to author, make the name a single field, and append '(ed.)' to their first initial. This is far from ideal, but I have little choice, as I cite more than 100 individual reports in this thesis.

adamsmith · December 29, 2015

We'll definitely add editor to reports, yes:
https://github.com/avram/zotero-bits/issues/31
Less sure about series editor -- do you have an example of a correct citation with an editor and a series editor?

brianhole · December 29, 2015

Great, thanks! Adding the editor type is all that is needed to solve this in my scenario. I also can't see why you would show both editor and series editor.

bwiernik · December 29, 2015

For the moment until Editor is added to reports, you can get the correct output by adding the editor names to Extra field with the following format:

{:editor: Last | First M.}