Upgrade StorageWhich Zotero type for a book review ?
Hi,
Which Zotero document type do you use when you want to create a reference that is a book review ?
The "journal article" type allows to add a "reviewed author", but where shall I add data like the Publisher of the reviewd book, its place, its number of pages, its series etc. ?
To add these in the article title is weird when I want to generate a bibliography, I can't have the right typography (italic for the title etc.).
Do you have a solution ? or at least any advice ? :-)
Thank you very much !
Which Zotero document type do you use when you want to create a reference that is a book review ?
The "journal article" type allows to add a "reviewed author", but where shall I add data like the Publisher of the reviewd book, its place, its number of pages, its series etc. ?
To add these in the article title is weird when I want to generate a bibliography, I can't have the right typography (italic for the title etc.).
Do you have a solution ? or at least any advice ? :-)
Thank you very much !
We may or may not need a full book review item type in the long run (I'm a bit skeptical, given that book reviews can appear in all types of different publications). As of now, the biggest problem is to cite a book review that itself has a title. You'll have to hack that with the title field, using rich text markup as needed:
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/rich_text_bibliography
[Review of the book Design talk: understanding the roles of usability practitioners, web designers, and web developers in user-centered web design, by Brenda Reeb]
In the above title, italics format output works up to the word "centered", so we're very close! Strangely, bold formatting via the < b > tag works for the entire title!
My work-around for now is to make a note for myself that book reviews need manual format fixing after inserting bibliography.
If anyone finds a fix, please let me know.
You only need to use rich-text formatting if uncommon case that the book review itself has a title--e.g., "The worst book I ever read: Review of A really bad book, by John Smith"
I'll double check whether the lack of italics and those two words (the book) are acceptable to our university's interpretation of APA 6th which was last updated 25th November 2016.
Cheers :)
reviewed-title: A book title
However, in the (seemingly rather rare?) situation when the article title is not simply the title of the reviewed work, matters go amiss, at least with the Chicago style (I have not tested other styles).
If the review article title is "Cogito Ergo Sum: A Review of the Meditations", then the generated biblio will say:
"Review of Cogito Ergo Sum: A Review of the Meditations",
with all but "Review of" in italics.
Whereas (I believe) it should simply list the title as:
"Cogito Ergo Sum: A Review of the Meditations", fully in italics, without the added "Review of"
Is there any way to fix this? Am I doing something wrong?
Thank you to anyone who might have an answer...
I hope that I am clearly describing my position and suggestion.
Thank you for the comment. My example was invented, but I meant that this is a review article of Meditations, not a review of a review. Yet the generated biblio meant it sound (erroneously) like it's a review of a review. That's what I would like to avoid.
If you can humour me here's the relevant bit from New Hart's Rules:
"Reviews are listed under the name of the reviewer; the place of publication and date of the book reviewed are helpful but not mandatory:
Ames-Lewis, F., review of Ronald Lightbown, Mantegna (Oxford, 1986), in Renaissance Studies, 1 (1987), 273–9.
If the review has a different title, cite that, followed by the name of the author and title of the book reviewed:
Porter, Roy, ‘Lion of the Laboratory’, review of Gerald L. Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton, 1995), in TLS (16 June 1995), 3–4."
One other notable departure from the journal article format is the use of "in" as prefix for the journal title. For a review that has a title of its own, the quotation marks do come into it, but just for this title.
Hardly the end of the world, but I guess if we are to enjoy different styles (and this one is arguably pretty neat), then perhaps a solution could be considered. I will look for a workaround among other item types, but happy to hear suggestions for that too.
Reviewed title: Title of the work being reviewed
In that case, the title of the item will be the title of the review itself. You can also specify the item is a book review in Extra by:
Type: review-book
But support for that varies across styles.
Does anyone know how to properly enter a single review, which reviews multiple books?
If one uses the "Reviewed Author" field, then the formatting is improper: All the authors are listed together after the list of book titles, instead of grouped per book title.
If one does not use the "Reviewed Author" field, and tries to manually format the title (using rich text of and to italicize the book titles, and adding author names per book title, then the result is that the entire title is erroneously formatted within quotation marks when citing (not proper, at least for Chicago windy city style).
Thank you for any guidance.
Best,
ZM
Seriously, it seems Zotero hasn't thought of this and created a simple way to do this as a standard type of publication. I hope I'm wrong.
The web page (https://columbiacollege-ca.libguides.com/apa/bookreviews) provides two examples for different types of book reviews: 'Book Review From Library Database (No Title)' and 'Book Review from a Website (with Title).' The examples use brackets([]) to enclose the reviewed item information, with the prefix 'Review of the book.' However, when using Zotero to generate citations, only 'Review of' is included.
Here is my solution and it worked as charm:
At first, I used 'Document' as the item type for a book review citation in Zotero and this would work for other item types such as journal articles or webpages.
Then, following the example of other users like justine.fabre, I entered the name of the reviewer in the 'Author' field and the name of the book author in the 'Reviewed Author' field.
To include the book title, as suggested by bwiernik, I added it to the 'Extra' field in the format 'reviewed-title: A book title.'
Finally, I replaced the default prefix 'Review of' with 'genre: Review of the book' in the 'Extra' field. Alternatively, you can use 'medium: Review of the book'.
Raskin, J. D. (2021). Not quite beyond the DSM [Review of the book Beyond the DSM: Toward a process-based alternative for diagnosis and mental health treatment, by S. C. Hayes & S. Hofmann, Eds.]. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 35(2), 841–843. https://doi.org/10.1080/10720537.2020.1865856
How do I accomplish that?
Medium: Review of the book Beyond the DSM: Toward a process-based alternative for diagnosis and mental health treatment, by S. C. Hayes & S. Hofmann, Eds.
into the extra field, this will come out correctly.
Medium: Review of the book Beyond the DSM: Toward a process-based alternative for diagnosis and mental health treatment by S. C. Hayes & S. Hofmann, Eds.