What's the Zotero way of dealing with chapter in a book?

gazagoal
edited June 26, 2021
Consider the scenario that I have a book entry, with several chapters. I might use the several chapters for different occasions. For example, one time I need the whole book. Next time, I need only specific chapter from the book, to avoid confusion for those who use my bibliography when I want them to read a specific chapter only.

The ways I do it now

1. Keep the chapters and the whole book separate entries. But it means they won't share the same attachment, for example, the PDF of the whole book.

2. Keep the whole book, and make the chapter a entry without attachment only with "related" pointing to the whole book. This is better, but needs an extra step to get to the document.

Any other ways, especially if there are Zotero's preferred way, to organize the chapter-book relation? Is there a way to do it with a single entry? Thanks in advance.
  • adamsmith
    You could use option 2. and for each chapter add a "link to file" to the whole book PDF attached to the whole book item -- beyond that, it sounds like you're on top of the relevant Zotero functionality, so nothing to add/change.
  • aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
    Returning to this in light of the Zotero 6 update. Zotero's native note-taking now supports clickable hyperlink citations. Clicking one of these citations in the note editor opens a popup with the option to "Go to Page," which will display the specific page of a PDF attachment in the PDF viewer. But I'm noticing that it doesn't always take me to the correct page - it will often open the wrong attachment if the parent item has more than one PDF attached. This is a noticeable interruption to the otherwise seamless pipeline that Zotero facilitates, and its especially problematic when each chapter of the book has been separated into individual files. If I'm using the Zotero Connector browser extension to import a book from a site like Project MUSE, for instance, the full text is downloaded not as a single PDF document containing the entire text. Instead, the text is broken up by chapter, and each PDF is added as an attachment under the same book item in Zotero. (Compared with JSTOR, which requires the user to manually open the web page for each chapter and import them one by one via the Connector, I find Project MUSE's implementation much less tedious, since it pulls all the chapters in bulk.)

    Are the devs planning to address this shortcoming in the future? I'm deciding if I should go through my library and create separate "Book Chapter" items for the chapters that I'm writing about. To me this seems like a hacky workaround and not very much in the spirit of Zotero as first-and-foremost a citation manager, since in the end I will be citing the book rather than the chapter. Alternatively, when I use an external markdown editor and drag my highlights from Zotero's PDF annotations into VS Code or IA Writer, the zotero://open-pdf/ links always point to the proper PDF attachment. But working with an external editor comes with its own sacrifices as well.
  • adamsmith
    I'm deciding if I should go through my library and create separate "Book Chapter" items for the chapters that I'm writing about. To me this seems like a hacky workaround and not very much in the spirit of Zotero as first-and-foremost a citation manager, since in the end I will be citing the book rather than the chapter.
    To be clear, the recommendation to use separate book chapter entries was intended for cases where those chapters are cited individually, i.e. most commonly in an edited volume. Not sure if that was what OP was referring to, but that's how I understood it. I'd definitely use a single entry with multiple attachments for a monograph.
    So this
    But I'm noticing that it doesn't always take me to the correct page - it will often open the wrong attachment if the parent item has more than one PDF attached.
    is almost certainly a bug and would be helpful to report with reproducible details (I'd generally recommend erring on the side of formulating posts as precise reports of undesired behavior rather than reflections on the nature of Zotero; the former are much more helpful for devs)
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