Item type: "Newspaper Article" - what to do with number of newspaper?

mirjam.amsterdam
Often newspapers are numbered, eg
Der fraynd (Peterburg) 12. (25.) Juli 1909
is no. 156 of that year.
Which is the designated field for that information?
Thanks, Mirjam
  • bwiernik
    That would be “Issue” which is not currently listed for Newspaper Article, but you can add to Extra like this:
    Issue: 156

    That will get picked up by most Citation styles.
  • mirjam.amsterdam
    Thanks for the suggestion & the info that it will get picked up by automatic Citation styles!
    Any chance the fild will be added to type "Newspaper article"?
  • bwiernik
    It will likely be added when Zotero item types and fields are updated in the next major version (tentatively numbered Zotero 5.1)
  • mirjam.amsterdam
    Thanks again for the answer. One last question: is there any tentative time line for the release of version 5.1?
  • adamsmith
    No timeline, no.
    I'm actually less convinced of issue numbers for Newspapers. I'm not seeing them cited very much (at all?) and exact dates are typically sufficient to clearly establish the citation.
  • mirjam.amsterdam
    Hi @adamsmith
    What you say is probably true for a bibliography of cited works within a scientific text written now.
    At the other hand: I am trying to use Zotero as a bibliographical program for a "standalone" bibliography of works / texts printed 100 or 200 years ago.
    For example, when I look up a book in the "Index of Yiddish Periodicals" housed at the National Libary of Israel I do get the issue number.
    Eg http://tinyurl.com/der-fraynd-a-briv-fun : 2nd year, number 23, 27th of January 1915. I do get the number-information also in the catalogue of the National Library of Russia, for the same issue of the newspaper: http://tinyurl.com/der-fraynd-russia
    (And yes, the connectors of the Index of Yiddish Periodicals and of the National Library of Russia to Zotero are quite bad.)
    So, for modern items it makes sense to omitt the issue numbers, for historical items it makes sense to keep them.
    Best, Mirjam
  • till.grallert
    I am a bit late to the discussion but would like to support Mirjam.

    I am working with late nineteenth-century press from the Eastern Mediterranean and citing issue and volume numbers is an absolute must! The background is that dates are terribly unreliable. Zotero---and most other software for that matter---allows as only to record Gregorian dates. But if we look at late Ottoman periodicals, we usually get publication dates in three calendars very different from the Gregorian Western paradigm (Islamic, reformed Julian, old Julian, Ethiopian, Ottoman fiscal). Even if we could record these calendars, the dates in the different calendars often don't match to a single Gregorian date. How to record and convey the decision as to which calendar would be the right one? Issue and volume numbers would be of immense help to disambiguate issues.

    You can find more information on one of my research projects at https://openarabicpe.github.io and the Zotero group at https://www.zotero.org/groups/904125/openarabicpe/items.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited November 29, 2019
    The issue of dates and the need for issue numbers is complicated even in Great Britain and its colonies:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates

    Sometimes (during an extended period of transition) more than one date was assigned to an issue of a newspaper or other documents.
  • mirjam.amsterdam
    Hello Till (@till.grallert) and @DWL-SDCA,
    Thanks for your additions.
    I just realised that it would be nice to ask for a general second date field for "dual dating" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_dating), but that would probably need to be in a different thread.
    Mirjam
  • adamsmith
    FWIW, I think the Arab periodicals like al-Muqtaṭaf are better classified as magazines (certainly for Zotero´s purposes, but I´d also say generally), and magazine articles do have issue and volume number.

    Yiddish daylies are trickier, so I understand the request for issue there. It's still a bit tricky from a reference manager perspective (e.g., we probably don't want most citation styles use issue for newspaper articles and it may also not be ideal to encourage users of typical, contemporary newspapers articles to waste time by including it, but we can see.
  • till.grallert
    Dear @adamsmith,

    I do see your point of differentiating between monthly and daily periodicals. However, the above-linked project contains bibliographic data for a lot of newspapers---published daily, bi-weekly, weekly or anything between---in addition to the editions of monthly journals. The issue of multiple non-Gregorian calendars is relevant for Arabic, Yiddish, Chinese, Russian etc. newspapers (you might want to check the original post that provided dual dates for the Yiddish newspaper from Rusia). Issue and volume numbers are the common means of disambiguation.

    Till
  • till.grallert
    Dear @mirjam.amsterdam,

    I support your suggestion of additional date fields. One could refer to the simple MODS encoding of alternative dates as a template:

    <dateOther calendar="julian">1909-06-07</dateOther>
    <dateOther>1909-06-07 [1909-06-20]</dateOther>

    Best,

    Till
Sign In or Register to comment.