One solution to this is to create a subcollection for every book or anthology for which one wishes to add chapters/book sections, and to organise the chapters into this subcollection. The subcollection then includes all related items, thus facilitating overview.
I support the idea of hierarchical items in Zotero and I like @devan's idea for the user interface.
@arggem : it is quicker to duplicate the Book entry as @ajlyon suggests, then change the type to Book Section. This keeps all the Book information and gives you a blank Title to complete by hand. @realtime99 makes a similar point. Of course, I am talking about the latest Zotero in 2020; I don't know what was available in 2008/9!
@"Kameela Amer" and @FrederickB : a workaround to get an overview of the whole book is to create a saved search that matches either Title or Publication (used as Book Title) to the name of the book. If you sort the result on page number, you basically have the table of contents :-)
Currently giving Zotero another try to organize references and research notes.
Sad to read all of this... I'd sure prefer a database structure where items can contain or parent other items, besides notes, files and links (which works fine now, looks nice and suggests that it would be great to add book chapters and journal articles the same way).
Or have relations different from... an empty category to link (certain) items? I.e. to use something like BibTeX-Crossref. The latter does the job relatively well, but my general experience using JabRef for test-case was not super-satisfying.
I looked this up a number of years back trying to find a solution, and came up empty handed. Thought I'd check again, but alas, still nothing. I am less concerned with the work of inputting the info twice (since the duplicate feature works well for this), and more with the fact that when cited in footnotes, if you have 5 articles from an edited anthology with a long title and multiple editors, it includes all of that info (plus date, publisher, place) on every individual article citation. It is unnecessary and cumbersome, and I'd rather not have to go into my manuscript at the very end to find all of the instances in which multiple articles/chapters came from the same volume in order to cut down those unnecessarily long citations. When you're working with 1000 or so footnotes with some percentage of them coming out of edited volumes, this constitutes substantial work.
@emilianoeheyns makes a great suggestion that works for me (and likely other bibtex/latex users). FYI, I also had to add `tex.booktitle: Name of Book Title` to the cross-referenced book entry to keep bibtex from giving a warning.
I am encountering this issue and have some thoughts about how to ease the pain a little. A plug-in to:
1. add "create section" function for book items. This will create a book section item with (1) all the metadata and (2) a link to the book as its "related item."
So the user will only need to provide the (1) section title and (2) section pages.
2. In case the metadata for the parent book item changes, the plugin also can "sync" the sections with the book. It simply replaces all the metadata EXCEPT for author(s), pages, and the section title.
Upgrade Storage
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/86468/feature-request-link-book-sections-to-book/
I support the idea of hierarchical items in Zotero and I like @devan's idea for the user interface.
@arggem : it is quicker to duplicate the Book entry as @ajlyon suggests, then change the type to Book Section. This keeps all the Book information and gives you a blank Title to complete by hand. @realtime99 makes a similar point.
Of course, I am talking about the latest Zotero in 2020; I don't know what was available in 2008/9!
@"Kameela Amer" and @FrederickB : a workaround to get an overview of the whole book is to create a saved search that matches either Title or Publication (used as Book Title) to the name of the book. If you sort the result on page number, you basically have the table of contents :-)
Sad to read all of this... I'd sure prefer a database structure where items can contain or parent other items, besides notes, files and links (which works fine now, looks nice and suggests that it would be great to add book chapters and journal articles the same way).
Or have relations different from... an empty category to link (certain) items? I.e. to use something like BibTeX-Crossref. The latter does the job relatively well, but my general experience using JabRef for test-case was not super-satisfying.
tex.crossref: ICRC2015to your
extrafield, and you'd getcrossref = {ICRC2015}in your output.1. add "create section" function for book items. This will create a book section item with (1) all the metadata and (2) a link to the book as its "related item."
So the user will only need to provide the (1) section title and (2) section pages.
2. In case the metadata for the parent book item changes, the plugin also can "sync" the sections with the book. It simply replaces all the metadata EXCEPT for author(s), pages, and the section title.
I'll try implementing it when I have time.
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After I typed this, I discovered Zutilo can already do this. See https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/79067/add-chapters-as-subsections-of-book