Non-exporting personal notes?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I am the developer (singular) of BBT, and
note
field (singular) is filled from the Zotero notes (plural). It doesn't seem likely actually.I've gone through the docs; BibTeXing says
Tame the BeaST says
and the biblatex manual says
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`.annotation
Perhaps a more sensible schema would be to put notes outside the item, and
extra
in thenote
field. That is a substantial change though.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.
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.note
field.Yet another option might be to use CSL a annote via the extra field
extra
inannote
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.