COVID-19 research urgently needs Item Type of PrePrint

dmilton
Dear coders:
As a CoVID-19 researcher -- I see an urgent need for a preprint Item Type in Zotero. The massive explosion of important research on SARS-CoV-2 (since January 2020 there have been 28,799 papers as of 2 Aug with many only available as preprints) cries out for a better solution in Zotero. It is not clear (to me anyway) at present whether it makes sense to merge preprint and peer-reviewed article -- sometimes both have been indexed in PubMed, suggesting that it may make sense to keep them separate. An item type of preprint that otherwise has all the fields (including doi) of a journal article would help greatly right now.

Please put this request on Warp Speed as Zotero's way of supporting CoVID-19 response. I see that the idea has been around for over a year -- so hopefully work has already been done that can be used to push this to fruition quickly.
  • bwiernik
    Generally, use Zotero type “Document” for this—it maps to the CSL type used for preprints (‘article’). What citation style are you using?
  • dmilton
    No, "Document" won't work. It would lose the following critical fields: Publication, Journal Abbr, and most importantly, DOI.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited August 2, 2020
    After many requests and much input from users, my online (not Zotero) database has assigned each of the various rXiv databases as a "journal" with volume = publication year and page=the article number. This allows for the DOI. A couple of these pre-print services even have ISSNs (while not being a serial in most any sense). Our BibTeX and RIS treat these as ty jour. I don't feel really comfortable with this but the vast majority of librarians are satisfied. It appears, from the small amount of user feedback I've received, that journal editors are accepting manuscripts with these references.

    I've been following this practice in my Zotero database.
  • adamsmith
    This won't happen any faster for preprints than it will for other item type changes. The problem isn't the actual changes but the manifold underlying and connected issues. No one is helped by a buggy Zotero with preprints.
    It would lose the following critical fields: Publication, Journal Abbr, and most importantly, DOI.
    You can add any Zotero field to an existing item using the extra field, e.g.
    DOI: 10.1234/5678
    publisher: BiorXiv

    (journal Abbr. would be container-title-short but I don't understand what that is for a preprint)
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