Reporting missing information for citations?

Anschewski
I would like get an overview of missing information in the references of a document. Technically, the word plug-in should know which fields required for the citations were empty. It seems that zotero simply ignores such missing fields (e.g. page numbers of a chapter; publisher of a book). Is there a way to get a report on the empty fields?

In my case, I have a document with some 500 references. Some of them have missing information and checking each manually seems to be avoidable.

Does anyone know if such a report is possible?
  • LiborA
    I think it is impossible.
    1. Each style requires different information.
    2. One type of item (e.g. article) can be referred in a different form; for example, some style requires pages for printed articles but this info is not shown in references for online articles.
    3. Some parts of references are optional and not necessary.
  • Anschewski
    Thank you LiborA, for your quick response.
    Don't you think the word plug-in should be able to write a protocoll during each refreshment of the references?

    1. & 2.: The word plug-in knows which style is used and which information needs to be collected therefore.
    3.: An optimal protocoll would mark empty fields that are required and empty fields that are optional.
  • LiborA
    Word plugin has no way to know what information needs to be collected. It seems as you do not know, how the most CSL styles (I mean the code) works. There are a lot of hacks, which are based on empty fields for some types of documents. Sorry, your request is really impossible.
  • adamsmith
    Dan and I had an exchange about this a while ago and ended up pretty much with what LiborA summarizes.[1] The citation styles are specifically designed so that different parts of information _can_ be missing and have no sense of optional or required fields. Many fields are required *when they exist* -- but there are works without authors, books without (known) publishers, works without (known) publication dates, and articles or chapters without pages. There is no way for Zotero or a citation style to know whether any piece of information is missing because it doesn't exist or because the data for an item is incomplete.

    That said, if there are common missing fields in your library, you could create some saved searches to clean those up, e.g. for book sections missing pages

    Item Type -- is -- Book Section
    Pages -- does not contain -- %

    (where the % is a wildcard standing in for any character)


    [1] Dan is Zotero's lead developer and I am one of the project leads for the citation style language
  • Anschewski
    Thank both of you, LiborA and Adam. I start realizing that my technical knowledge is too limited, so I had some dreams...

    The idea with saved searches to clean up is worth noting. Since my database is much bigger than what I cite in the document, I will start checking the references manually.
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