How to enter books and reports where chapters are written by different authors

Hi --

I am not sure how to best enter for citations books and reports where there is one editor of the book or reports and each chapter or sub section is written by different authors. Especially since I will be using more than one chapter or section from the work.

Do I create separate entries for each chapter/section?

(Going to be doing APA and Chicago styles)
  • edited February 28, 2019
    Yes, create separate entries for each chapter, and cite for those authors as separate works (which is really what they are, just like journal articles that happen to be published in an edited volume).

    --

    This would only get tricky if you somehow needed to cite a work as a whole while attributing it to each individual author as part of the group, but that would be a very uncommon format (not APA or Chicago) so it shouldn't be a problem (and in that case, referring to a whole book, you would just cite by editor). Referring to sub-sections of works can also get a little tricky, if they don't nicely break up into book sections. There are a few help threads discussing that topic on the forums here, if you run into one of those unusual situations. But from your question it sounds like the most common case, easily solved with the "Book Section" item type in Zotero.
  • Create a separate item for each chapter. Add the title for the full report and the editors to Extra like this:
    Container title: Title of full report
    Editor: Last || First A.
  • @bwiernik Why so? For a "Book Chapter" item, you can change "Author" for "Editor" and use the "Book Title" field
  • edited February 28, 2019
    @poettli, for report sections, which don't have as many options as book chapters.

    (This is not needed for normal book chapters, for which there is a special type.)
  • @djross3 Use "Book Section" item for this.
  • No. Reports are formatted differently in some styles, so you must use report plus additional information in Extra, in order to achieve a properly formatted "report section".
  • edited February 28, 2019
    @poettli If you use “Report”, it will correctly handle the report-specific formatting requirements in APA and Chicago (including the report type and number, substituting the publisher for a missing author, etc.). These won’t be the same if you use Book Section.
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