Adding a field to comment a reference in the formatted bibliography

phil.renaud · July 19, 2019

I would like to have the possibility to add a short text before a reference. My formatted reference should look like that:

[42] For a pioneer work in the field, see: T. C. Atack, S. P. Cook, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2016, 138, 6139–6142.

Is there a simple solution to do that?

I think I can use the field "Extra" to achieve this but I don't know how to modify my style to have this possibility.

I am grateful for any help

bwiernik · July 20, 2019

What style are you using?

phil.renaud · July 20, 2019

I use the styles Angewandte Chemie International Edition and American Chemical Society.

bwiernik · July 21, 2019

For those styles and this purpose, I would recommend using the Edit Bibliography function in the Zotero tab in Word. This will let you add those comments to the items for this specific document, without them appearing in other documents.

phil.renaud · July 21, 2019

Thanks alot, this is an easy solution that solve my problem.

adamsmith · July 22, 2019

I think that's going to be problematic for numerical styles -- I'm pretty sure editing the bibliography prevents updating of citation numbers, so you get bibliographies that are no longer aligned with citation numbers, i.e. pretty much useless.

fbennett · July 22, 2019

It does seem to resort on refresh, though, with correct numbering on the unedited items, so the numbers on edited items could be manually adjusted through the bib editor before finalizing.

phil.renaud · July 22, 2019

Numbering in text is fine and correctly refreshed but the edited reference(s) in the list has to be updated manually. Not perfect but I can live with this for short manuscript. For longer one (over 100 references), it is not really satisfactory.

bwiernik · July 22, 2019

Okay, in that case, what you should do is add the annotations to Extra like this:
annote: Your comment

Then, edit the .csl file to add:
<text variable="annote" suffix=" "/>

In the bibliography section of the style, right after the line with citation-number. Then change the style title and ID at the top of the file, save, and install into Zotero.

(I wonder if this sort of use of annote could be implicitly used by the edit bibliography function? Edit: Or probably a better idea would just be to add prefix and suffix support to cs:bibliogrpahy?)