Question about reports & gray literature and bibliography exports
After I did some quick searching, I didn't find an existing discussion about my issue; apologies if I missed it.
My university uses APA 7th edition and for reports and gray literature that are a PDF that's linked to a web page, it says to use this general format:
Author. (Date). Title. Publisher Info. URL
When I'm using the connector, I let it default to Web Page, switch the Item Type to Report and that's where my question comes in.
There are lots of additional fields that "can" be entered when you select Report as your item type, such as Pages, Institution, Place, etc. The advice I was given by a librarian was to just not include those details in the References list for this kind of reference. Is this the actual workaround, or is there another tech-based option that I'm missing out on?
Corollary questions:
1. What's the reason for not including a Gray Literature Item Type? I'm assuming that each style guide handles Gray Literature differently.
2. When I select APA 7th as my Citation Style and add a bibliography, why does it include the other information that's not specified in the style guide?
Example:
The report is on this site: https://www.uvic.ca/external/community/students-dialogue/index.php
Here's Zotero's output for the bibliography item in APA 7th:
Johnson, R. (2021). Pursuing Deliberative Democracy at the University of Victoria: Report on the Students’ Dialogue on Democratic Engagement (pp. 1–35). University of Victoria. https://www.uvic.ca/external/community/students-dialogue/index.php
My university uses APA 7th edition and for reports and gray literature that are a PDF that's linked to a web page, it says to use this general format:
Author. (Date). Title. Publisher Info. URL
When I'm using the connector, I let it default to Web Page, switch the Item Type to Report and that's where my question comes in.
There are lots of additional fields that "can" be entered when you select Report as your item type, such as Pages, Institution, Place, etc. The advice I was given by a librarian was to just not include those details in the References list for this kind of reference. Is this the actual workaround, or is there another tech-based option that I'm missing out on?
Corollary questions:
1. What's the reason for not including a Gray Literature Item Type? I'm assuming that each style guide handles Gray Literature differently.
2. When I select APA 7th as my Citation Style and add a bibliography, why does it include the other information that's not specified in the style guide?
Example:
The report is on this site: https://www.uvic.ca/external/community/students-dialogue/index.php
Here's Zotero's output for the bibliography item in APA 7th:
Johnson, R. (2021). Pursuing Deliberative Democracy at the University of Victoria: Report on the Students’ Dialogue on Democratic Engagement (pp. 1–35). University of Victoria. https://www.uvic.ca/external/community/students-dialogue/index.php
"Gray literature" isn't actually an item type. It's a catch-all for anything that isn't formally published but "kind of" published, i.e. would include reports, webpages, potentially blogposts, documents, by some accounts theses -- and I'm probably forgetting some.
Also, I *did* record the Institution and Place in my Zotero but it didn't export in my example. I used Create Bibliography > Output as Copy to Clipboard. I'd upload a screenshot of my Parent Item as confirmation, but this discussion board doesn't seem to allow that.
P.S. Is the Pages field buggy on all Parent Items? In my bibliography, Pages for Journal Articles gets exported without putting a "pp." in front but not for Book Sections. I had to hand-correct all of them just now.
Journal articles:
Baniya, S., & Weech, S. (2019). Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented digital research with service-learning. Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement, 6(1), 11–16. https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284316979
Book chapters:
Armstrong, D. (2019). Malory and character. In M. G. Leitch & C. J. Rushton (Eds.), A new companion to Malory (pp. 144-163). D. S. Brewer.
(italics left out because I'm lazy, but Zotero does them right)