Short Title instead of Author/Date for specific works

samvimes
Hi!
In my current project I need to cite from the collected works of Marx & Engels quite frequently. I use the Marx/Engels Werke (MEW) edition. In my discipline it is the norm to cite it in the form (MEW Volume, Page).

Is there a simple way to achieve that with Zotero? I'm currently using a slightly modified version of this style: https://www.zotero.org/styles/politische-vierteljahresschrift

Example: Instead of

„Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa - das Gespenst des Kommunismus.“ (Marx/Engels 1977, S. 461)

I would prefer

„Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa - das Gespenst des Kommunismus.“ (MEW 4, S. 461)

Thank you!
  • djross3
    edited August 29, 2021
    The direct way would be to use "MEW" as the (only) author, if you're able to format the reference properly without the authors. (For example, for a dictionary, they could be included as editors instead, as is often the case for the Oxford English Dictionary cited as OED. Or if this work could be formatted as including the authors' names as part of the title, that might work also.) Note that the year would typically still be included in the citation, unless you also omitted that and formatted it some other way.

    Otherwise, you could try to find a workaround using a custom style, I think.

    --
    Note: another simple workaround is to formally cite this using Zotero only in the first instance [e.g.: MEW (Marx/Engels 1977....)], then just write in the alternative form manually for the rest of your document. The advantage is that it's simple to do that, but the disadvantage is that you lose the automatic formatting and must remember to include the Zotero citation in the first instance so it is included in your bibliography.
  • samvimes
    Thank you! I think I'll have to it the second way and be careful about not forgetting works in the bibliography.
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