Non-exporting personal notes?

ryofurue
I was wondering where or in which field I should write my own personal notes to an item.

I naïvely used the "Notes" pane on the right hand panel and was surprised that Better Bibtex exported my personal notes as the formal "notes" field of the bibtex file.

I understand that the formal "notes" field is to add information like "in press" in the reference list, and therefore the formal "notes" field must be exported.

So, my question is, where should I write my personal notes, which shouldn't be exported.
  • adamsmith
    That's the right place for your notes. I believe you can simply uncheck exporting Notes on BBT export, is that not the case?
  • ryofurue
    > I believe you can simply uncheck exporting Notes on BBT export, is that not the case?

    It's not the case, unfortunately.

    If one unchecks exporting Notes, where does one write notes that MUST be exported?

    Maybe I wasn't clear. Bibtex has formal "notes."
    ````
    @techreport{somelabel,
    title = { . . . },
    author = {. . .},
    notes = {Originally published in Russian}
    }
    ````
    This "notes" must be printed in the reference list.

    So, I need two "notes" fields for each item. One is for this kind of formal notes, which must be exported and the other is for personal notes which mustn't be exported.
  • emilianoeheyns
    The only way I can think of is to tag one of them and then include/exclude the notes in a postscript based on the presence/absence of that tag.
  • adamsmith
    Do you export plain Extra to note in BBT?
  • ryofurue
    > Do you export plain Extra to note in BBT?

    Thanks for the nice idea. In principle, that is a good idea, but in practice, it wouldn't work, I'm afraid. The Extra field is filled with irrelevant information when you import bibliographic information from a website into Zotero. Such information shouldn't be printed in the reference list of your paper.
  • ryofurue
    > The only way I can think of is to tag one of them and then include/exclude the notes in a postscript based on the presence/absence of that tag.

    Thanks!

    So, this discussion suggests that

    1) The developers of Better Bibtex think that Notes is the formal notes to be printed in the reference list;

    2) Everybody else thinks that Notes are personal notes, which shouldn't be printed.

    And this disagreement is the lack of the facility (of separating personal notes from formal notes).

    But, how do people (who don't use Bibtex) separate these two pieces of information on Zotero? Personal notes and formal notes?
  • emilianoeheyns

    I am the developer (singular) of BBT, and

    1. I don't have a strong opinion on whether these notes are "personal", or "formal", or something else entirely. I don't think that Zotero assigns such meaning, either, but I could be mistaken
    2. CSL styles can access notes, so note-printing must be a thing in citeproc. I have to admit I don't know of any styles that do this, and I don't know if the csl note field (singular) is filled from the Zotero notes (plural). It doesn't seem likely actually.

    I've gone through the docs; BibTeXing says

    Any additional information that can help the reader.

    Tame the BeaST says

    any additional data you would want to add. Since classical styles were written in 1985, they don’t have a url field, and note is often used for this purpose, together with the url.sty package.

    and the biblatex manual says

    Use the fields howpublished and note to supply additional information in free format, if applicable and Miscellaneous bibliographic data which does not fit into any other field. The note field may be used to record bibliographic data in a free format. Publication facts such as “Reprint of the edition London 1831” are typical candidates for the note field.

    This seems pretty non-commital on what should be in the note field, I recognize that for bibtex it would be sensible to separate "what I want in the note field" and "these are my research notes", but it doesn't look to me like Zotero has a direct equivalent for the bib(la)tex note field (which isn't uncommon). bib(la)tex "research notes" are possible as a side effect from the fact that everything that is not in an entry is ignored, so you can put almost any notes before or after an entry in free text. On reflection I agree that the closest Zotero equivalent would be the notes. But then I don't have a source for `note`.

  • emilianoeheyns
    edited August 24, 2021
    Do you export plain Extra to note in BBT?
    yes, to annotation

    Perhaps a more sensible schema would be to put notes outside the item, and extra in the note field. That is a substantial change though.
  • ryofurue
    @emilianoeheyns Thank you so much for your comprehensive answer.

    The best solution would be for the Zotero community as a whole to make the decision of where the personal research notes should go and where to put the extra bit of information which sometimes needs to be printed in the reference list.

    If such a consensus is impossible to form, then I guess you, as the developer of BBT, are the person to make that decision in the design of the BBT exporter.

    Having said that, Zotero's "Notes" is presented as separate from "Info". Therefore, it's more intuitive for the user, **not** to export "Notes". If it's something to be exported, it should be in the "Info" category.
  • emilianoeheyns
    @adamsmith do you know what Zotero uses to fill the CSL note field? I'm trying to make sense of the schema files where I think the information should be but I haven't found it yet.
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited August 24, 2021
    Got it. It's the extra field. However, at https://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#appendix-iv-variables it says
    (short) inline note giving additional item details (e.g. a concise summary or commentary)
    but there are styles that use the note. So it seems that is appropriately close to the bib(la)tex note field.
  • adamsmith
    Yes, that is why I was asking. CSL actually cannot access zotero notes, so those are never cited.

    Yet another option might be to use CSL a annote via the extra field
  • emilianoeheyns
    BBT currently stores extra in annote for biblatex, but given these new insights, note seems to be a better choice for both bibtex and biblatex. The one remaining issue would be is that for bibtex there is contention on that field for showing urls, but that tradeoff already exists.
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