using "note" to include non-citation items in bibliography for sciencemag

Charles H. Langley
Hello:

A while back there was a short thread about sciencemag's unique bibliography that includes non-citations such as descriptions of methods and material in experiments. Including such information in the "note" section would appear to work fine. But I have discover two problems.

First with my setup (LO3.4 & Firefox on macosx 10.7) the text from the note section is truncated in the bibliography. Is this coming from the CSL or the LO extension? Any known work arounds?

Second (and more is the "desired feature" vein) is the inclusion of equations in such notes. In Science it is not unusual for the bibliography to contain equations and mathematical "characters".

Thanks for any help or thoughts.

Cheers,
Chuck
  • adamsmith
    edited January 30, 2012
    I believe you would just get the title of the note, which is its text until the first carriage return. Technically speaking that's CSL, but there is no way to get the entire text of the note.

    As for equations - I don't think that can be done. Equations aren't covered by UTF-8 and so I wouldn't know how Zotero would be able to supply them in a universally accepted format.

    edit: personally, I would just use some type of placeholder for non-reference items the bibliography (which could be a note) and then add the actual content manually at the end of the editing process.
  • Charles H. Langley
    Adam:

    Thanks for responding so quickly.

    I am definitely choosing and getting the note (not the title). That is to say I put unique text in the note (that is not in the title). That text is rendered in the bibliography. But it is truncated after 83 characters (including whitespaces) and a period in added. Also the modifications of the characters (italic, bold and superscript) are lost.

    One question I have concern the item type I chose, Document. I experimented with Standalone Note. Again I got the same result: truncation and loss of modification of characters.

    Thanks again.

    Cheers,
    Chuck
  • Charles H. Langley
    Adan:


    OK, equations are out and adding them as postprocessing is the only option. This and your own approach militate toward place holders as the simple "solution".

    But that makes me ask if it might not be possible at the word-processor extension level to insert a "linked" "section" in the same document or an second file (say of notes)? If I am preparing these to pasted in later they can be marked and perhaps inserted. That sounds like a big feature request, but LO appears to have the ability to automatically insert text and figures.

    Sciencemag is not the only journal using this mixing model for their bibliography. So their may be a growing market in the biology world.

    Thanks,
    Chuck
  • dublin

    With respect to the note truncating, I'm getting the same with both Microsoft 2003 and Open Office 3.3.0. Presumably Zotero 3.0 makes a title out of the first 83 characters of a stand alone note, this makes sense for an index but when the note is being inserted as a footnote or endnote the full text database entry should obviously be used. Inserting a note title makes no sense and will only annoy readers.

    What are we missing here?

    Many thanks,

    Tony D.

  • fbennett
    It's not clear to me what people are doing here. Is this about text entered in the Extra field of a Zotero item, or proper note items (either standalone or attached to an item) that are somehow being sent to the CSL processor for insertion into the document?
  • dublin
    You create you bibliography and stand alone notes in Zotero. You then open your document that is to have footnotes/endnotes added. The bibliography items are added (in Word or Open Office) with no problem. The stand alone notes on the otherhand are truncated (footnote/endnote no difference). They appear essentially the same as they do under the Title bar index in Zotero.
  • fbennett
    But how are you adding the notes to the document?
  • dublin
    Good point! I use the Insert Citation button. This is wrong?
  • fbennett
    Thanks. I'm just surprise that it inserts something, and I wonder what CSL variable is used to render it. Title, perhaps? In any case, the citation processor will not modify the content; whatever is received in an ordinary field as input will be output verbatim.
  • adamsmith
    just to be clear - the fact that this is at all possible is more a fluke than a feature. Inserting standalone notes into a document has never been a supported feature.
    I think it's worth thinking about better ways of introducing notes into the citation process, but I doubt this will happen anytime soon. So you're not missing anything, this just isn't supported.
  • dstillman
    the fact that this is at all possible is more a fluke than a feature
    Yup.
  • dublin

    The present setup inputs the truncated note and keeps the numbering system intact.
    In programming terms when the Insert Citation button is clicked all it has to do is differentiate between a note and a bibliographic entry, and in the case of a note, not truncate it. If the data is kept in a database there should be a separate field for the full note entry.

    Now one provisional way of dealing with the issue is simply to copy and paste the note. This works fine and if the document is saved as HTML document all the links etc work fine (I would suggest adding a margin-left:5px; for the a.link styling).
    However, the pasted note is probably 'outside' of Zotero and this may be storing up trouble in some cases.

    My own interest is that I'm going to a symposium at the end of the summer to present how different web interfaces can be used to present various materials in different fields of anthropology (including Timeline-Timemap) and it occurred to me that the one item missing from my tool kit was a proper way for contributors to add commentaries on original materials in a formal way. Zotero seems to me to fit the bill as the HTML generated is very simple and easily stored in a database.

    The only thing I noticed in the HTML generated is that in the meta tags the Zotero pref code is stored in two pieces as below which doesn't make sense to me. I presume the session id is significant and needs to be kept track off.

    meta tag: ZOTERO_PREF_1

    &lt;data data-version=&quot;3&quot; zotero-version=&quot;3.0.7&quot;&gt;&lt;session id=&quot;41AU8HCG&quot;/&gt;<br />
    &lt;style id=&quot;http://www.zotero.org/styles/mhra&quot; hasBibliography=&quot;1&quot;<br />
    bibliographyStyleHasBeenSet=&quot;0&quot;/&gt;&lt;prefs&gt;&lt;pref name=&quot;fieldType&quot;<br />
    value=&quot;ReferenceMark&quot;/&gt;&lt;pref name=&quot;storeReferences&quot; valu

    meta tag: ZOTERO_PREF_2

    e=&quot;true&quot;/&gt;&lt;pref name=&quot;noteType&quot; value=&quot;2&quot;/&gt;&lt;/prefs&gt;&lt;/data&gt;

    Anyway Zotero I think is a great tool and with a few tweaks will become an indispensible one.

  • thanasis57
    I have the same problem. My workaround, I think, will be the one I describe at https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/58996/jurism-footnotes-without-citation/#Comment_254562
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