In anthropology and associated disciplines, "forthcoming" is common, and, to me, gives the impression that the publication is submitted, reviewed, accepted, and is now on track to be published (perhaps awaiting minor edits). Usually it will be 'forthcoming, in 2009' or 'forthcoming, for 2010.' "In press" often seems more open ended, perhaps synonymous with 'accepted' (?). My sense is that you don't see these terms as much in published articles and books; rather, they are more common on c.v.s or in articles that have been submitted to workshops, seminars, perhaps in papers submitted to journals (where the date of publication will be hashed out by the time the submitted article goes to press). They are useful terms, though, so I'm certainly in favor of being able to do this through Zotero. Thanks for taking it on!


Edit: now that I look more closely at AdamSmith's comment above, I realize I've directly contradicted his sense of open-ness / closed-ness of "in press" versus "forthcoming." Hmm.. Well, perhaps there are disciplinary norms at work, or perhaps this is all highly personal and informal, taking place on the edges of journals' styles?

FWIW, in the biological sciences I've seen in preparation which could mean nearly anything and is therefore mostly meaningless; submitted, which is of value chiefly because it means the paper is finished enough to be sent to the publisher and has co-authors' consent etc--this is a meaningful distinction to me; and in press, which biologists use as a catch-all for the period between acceptance and availability.

That said, with regard to keeping this simple and accommodating the most common uses, I don't think its a huge thing for biologists--the main places these things are used is CVs and the like, and for authors citing a forthcoming paper of their own in a current one. For these few uses it seems not unreasonable for folks to manually edit citations.

[The APA] however suggest the ever elegant "Manuscript submitted for publication" or "Manuscript in preparation" in later individual examples. (p. 211)

Because a style guide that popular gives specific examples & because we have at least one specific use case for these citations (C.V.s), I think CSL should have these concepts as well. That would mean terms for 1 (in-preparation), 3 (submitted-for-publication), 4 (forthcoming), and 5 (in-press) in my list of possible statuses.

Why should "in press" be allowed? Please don't tell me "because that's what a lot of people use" because a) in many cases that term is used incorrectly, and b) "forthcoming" is inclusive of "in press" (e.g. to use "forthcoming" for an in-press article is also correct).

Yes, status is not anything to do with type (though admittedly there is some blurry area where people sometimes describe a manuscript as "unpublished manuscript" or some such). I'd really like to consider this use case very narrowly as related only to journal articles, books, and maybe legislation (bills and such; but this is a separate issues anyway).

Do you agree that "type/genre" is inappropriate?

I don't think you can draw the line so solidly. If you've been invited to submit a paper somewhere, surely that somewhere is a container & it is worth keeping track of (despite you not actually submitting it yet)?

I'm not sure what "others" you refer to. If the APA manual has examples of "in preparation," I don't know why you would consider it an unreasonable variable for status.

Similarly, "in press" is obviously a valid status that is distinct from "forthcoming." Parenthetically: I do not think "in press" is misused any more than "forthcoming" is. The only question is whether we want to be granular enough to denote that something isn't merely "forthcoming," but is also "in press." APA & Chicago don't seem to think so (despite common use to the contrary), but perhaps other style manuals disagree...

While I understand how you intrepret "in press" to literally mean it is at the printers I am relatively confident that no one who has put in press in a bibliography actually meant that. To again quote our good friends at APA.

Write in press in parentheses for articles that have been accepted for publication but that have not yet been published.(p. 185)

As far as APA is concerned in press is the only thing (other than n.d) that should be substituted in the date spot.

As far as APA is concerned in press is the only thing (other than n.d) that should be substituted in the date spot.

So this is what I am seeing:

APA says an article should be described as "in press."

Chicago says the same article should be called "forthcoming."

Doesn't that suggest one concept not only suffices, but is necessary?

Or are you suggesting that a user should be required to change the value in their data depending on the style they use?

I'm just looking for the easiest solution that will work: both in the data layer, and in the output styling.

I guess to get to noksagt's last point, the key question (beyond mine above) is whether we require that a bibliography be able to include both?

To follow on from Bruce, perhaps this could this be handled by a single boolean toggle in the input, and an assortment of terms.

I would agree with Bruce on the fact that APA's in press sounds identical to Chicago's forthcoming. If we just supported this in a style specified term I think we would resolve a majority of the cases for this sort of thing.

To walk through what this would look like from adding an item to Zotero through to being styled by a CSL. If an item has 1) a date of publication in the future 2) the word forthcoming or 3) the words in press; in the date field we would us that to trigger the style specific date entry for "This is vetted and will be published" term in whatever individual style the user is writing with.

I also don't think the "future date"-criterion is a good thing. If I reopen an old document in which I cited an article that was not published at the time of writing (future date), but which has been published now (past date), I wouldn't want the status of that paper to change (and thus the use of the "forthcoming" or "in press" term to disappear) when I refresh the bibliography. For one, it would make spotting papers that need updating in my Zotero library more difficult.

I think an in-press check box would cover many of the bases, but not all of them. The original issue is what happens to the date. If something is "in press" (accepted for publication and working through whatever is involved in getting from an accepted corrected MS to the final publication) at a journal, it *might* have a date year or it might not. The editor might not know yet whether it will come out in the last issue of 2009 or first issue of 2010. More ambiguous are books and book chapters. Even with the MS approved for publication by the publisher, it can take over a year for the book to actually see the light of day.

In both of these latter cases, the author will not know the year of publication. So there needs to be a date value to indicate this uncertainty. I think that "n.d." will probably work in the greatest majority of cases for this. This is different from a style-related "(in press)" or "(forthcoming)" added to the end of the bibliography. Without a placeholder like "n.d.", the in-text citation of (Smith, n.d.), becomes simply (Smith) and the bibliography style is likewise borked up.

So my question is: can we get by with "n.d." in the date field of all of these kinds of publications in the future, with a specifier like "in press" at the end (as indicated in a number of posts above), or do people think that it is necessary to have "in press" and the like show up in place of the date in the citation an bibliography?

Michael

AFAIC, an "n.d." supplied by the CSL processor if the date field is empty would do the trick. This seems like a nice solution to multiple issues. I don't know about other folks.

Does anyone know which styles implement the "n.d." instead of a data option? Normally, the date must be a number or date of some kind.

So, what are people doing currently? I've manually typed forthcoming or n.d. so far but I agree that it would be good to have this automated. "Forthcoming" "in press" and "n.d." would cover all reasonable bases for me.

I observed that a recent release now defaults to "n.d." when the date in a database entry is blank. This is a good feature, but it does cause a problem with my existing use of Zotero for historical research citations. For example, in documenting the history of an organization, where there is a stable format for meetings, I have put the information other than meeting date in the database (e.g., John Jones, "Meeting Minutes,"....) and qualified the database entry in the citation by putting the date in the box where the page, chapter, book, etc. are entered (e.g., John Jones, "Meeting Minutes," January 1, 1900,....). With the new date default, my entries now show up as (John Jones, "Meeting Minutes," n.d., January 1, 1900,....). One suggestion to resolve this problem would be to incorporate into the "Add/Edit Citation Window" a "Suppress n.d." check box functionality similar to the "Suppress Author" check box. Another suggestion would be to include "date" in the options for the "page, book, chapter, etc." drop down box, and if date was selected, "n.d." would be suppressed. Thank you for any consideration you may give to this request.