Multiple levels of structure

Book section entries allow one to separately enter the title of the section and the book. Sometimes there are multiple structural levels (e.g., part, chapter); the only provision for this appears to be the “volume” bit, but I can't see any provision for parts/chapters.

1. How can one enter the part and the chapter?
2. How does numbering work? Does one enter the number oneself in the book section bit—“Chapter 3. Blah”, or can Zotero/the relevant style after export to BibLaTeX take care of that?
  • Can you give a specific real example of a reference you are trying to make?

    Chapter numbers can be entered in Extra:
    Chapter number: 3

    Note that most citations don’t require chapter numbers to be included.
  • An example might be Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; there're parts, but also chapters.

    If it's only possible to specify one structural level, is there a way to indicate that it is, for example, a subsection, or a chapter, or a part?
  • Can you actually please provide a full reference for citations to the different parts? It is very hard for me to understand hypothetical examples in these cases.
  • I can't provide an output from a citation, since I don't know how to specify this sort of thing in Zotero and thus provide an output. It may be that no citation style allows the inclusion of both (for example) the part and the chapter that one wishes to cite, in which case it is unsurprising that Zotero also has no provision for this; that may be why this seems so odd.
  • We are having a misunderstanding. Please type out manually a formatted reference for how you want this to appear. Once I know exactly what you are looking for, I can provide some guidance.
  • What I was after is something along the lines of

    Robert Nozick. “[chapter name]”. In: Anarchy, State and Utopia [something indicating the part number]. [publication details],

    where the second part in square brackets was the part whose insertion I was unsure about.

    It may be that no (or few) citation styles provide for that, in which case it would again not be very surprising that Zotero doesn't provide for this either.
  • Okay, that isn’t what I was thinking you were asking about, so I’m glad you start to clarify. But again, I still don’t have enough information to give you guidance. Can you please write out a COMPLETE Reference with the EXACT information you want to appear? “[something about a part number]” isn’t enough, because the best place to put the information will depend on exactly what a “part” is. Is a “part” a sub part of a volume (like a section or something) or is it referring to a “part” of a series or multi volume work (e.g., something like The Collected Works of John Doe, Part 1)?
  • FWIW, I have never seen a citation style that would have you cite chapters from a single-authored books. The point of citation styles is to make the cited information findable, and for that just citing a specific edition of Anarchy, State, and Utopia and then, in the citation/footnote, referring to a specific page number is perfectly sufficient. I guess I'm wondering where this idea is coming from?
  • adamsmith:

    I'm importing some citations for a periodical that I edit (the citations were done by hand in a Word document). It then occurred to me that chapter references might be helpful, because they indicate what the chapter covers (sometimes); some things are from multi-author works, and one of those citations caused me to start thinking about this.

    I see what you mean about page numbers—the benefit is therefore fairly marginal.

    Also, how do you italicise things in comments? All I can see is a plaintext box for input. Does markdown work?

    biernik:

    It's a one-volume work. In this case, there're three parts in the whole one-volume book, so it's like a section. I'm hesitant to prescribe anything, since it would probably contradict whatever style of citation provides for it, so I hope that this is enough information; however, I was envisioning something like this:

    Robert Nozick. “Distributive Justice”¹, “Beyond the Minimal State”. In: Anarchy, State and Utopia [publication details],

    ¹ this being the chapter
    ² this being the part

    As adamsmith suggests, provision for this might not be very common, in which case I don't really mind abandoning this, but if there is some sort of established provision for this in some established citation style, the marginal benefit additional to simply providing the page number would be worth it.
  • I've never seen this in a citation style, no.

    You can use basic html tags in the forums, e.g. <i>italics</i>
  • Okay, with that information, I can offer some suggestions. I'm still not exactly clear what sort of items you are describing, so I will consider a few cases.

    Since these are articles in a periodical, I would recommend storing them as Journal Article. This will generally yield the most appropriate citation formats, unless your "periodical" is more like a book series, wherein the editor of the volume or the series should also be cited. In that case, use Book Section.

    In terms of the various "locators" that are available in Zotero/CSL, Journal Article has Volume, Issue, and Page, which describe the position of the article within the broader Journal publication. There is also the Series (for describing the position of the article in a series across issues) and Series Title (better called "Section Title" for describing the section within a single issue that holds the article). Subsections within a specific article (some basic examples—"Introduction" or "Discussion") aren't usually cited on their own, and you would generally just enter the whole article into Zotero. If you need to refer to a specific page or section within the article, you would do this by adding a page number (or section number, etc.) or suffix to the citation in Word (and not to the item data stored in your Zotero library). Sometimes, an article might be published in multiple parts (e.g., "Modern taxonometric analysis. Part I. Statistical theory" and "Modern psychometric analysis. Part II. Applications"). These "parts" are usually published in separate issues. Zotero/CSL doesn't currently have perfect support for these types of citations. Most citation style requirements can be met simply by entering the title and part information together as the item title. Additional support for part number/part title to accomodate styles where these types of items are more common is planned for the next update to CSL: https://github.com/citation-style-language/zotero-bits/issues/12. However, this doesn't really seem like what you mean with your example (see below).

    The same basic points apply to book sections. Series and Series Number refer to the multibook series a book belongs to. Volume refers to which volume in a multivolume book (e.g., a 12-volume Handbook of Psychology) that the particular chapter is in. If you want to store the Chapter Number (the Chapter Title is just the the title of the Book Section item), you can store it in Extra like this:
    Chapter number: 2

    Styles that use this information will pick it up from there (but almost none do). As with periodical articles, it's not typical to store information about separate subsections within a specific chapter as separate items, as all citation styles would instead just require the chapter as a whole be cited and then the specific section/page just be referred to in text/footnotes. The kind of multipart articles described above for journal articles are extremely rare for book chapters.

    For your example, I would recommend you just store the chapter/journal article with "Distributive Justice" as the Title and "Anarchy, State and Utopia" as the Publication/Book Title. Referring to "Beyond the Minimal State" would just happen when the chapter/article is cited in text by referrring to the section title as a prefix/suffix or simply to the page number.
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