Abstract comments showing up in footnotes

Vhinders · February 1, 2023

Books I'm adding to my library from Amazon or WorldCat that have abstracts, now embed the abstract content into the middle of the footnote (but it doesn't happen in the bibliography). I manually delete the abstract information from within the footnote as a workaround, but I'm thinking this is a problem. Is anyone else having this problem? If so, any thoughts on how to resolve it?

adamsmith · February 1, 2023

which citation style. What's in the Extra field of those items?

Vhinders · February 1, 2023

It's called SEBTS SBL Supplement

Vhinders · February 1, 2023

For the book I'm looking at, the Extra field has this: OCLC: 960029232

Vhinders · February 1, 2023

For this example, I picked a random book that I downloaded to my library from both Amazon and WorldCat, Randy Newmans Questioning Evangelism (2017, Kregel Publishers). When I used either source (Amazon or WorldCat) they both embedded the abstract in the middle of the footnote.

adamsmith · February 1, 2023

I assume that's a problem with the style -- that's none of ours. Where did you get that from?

Vhinders · February 1, 2023

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS). Here's the link: https://library.sebts.edu/zotero/supplement

adamsmith · February 1, 2023

That style is specifically printing the abstract -- I wouldn't know why. Contact the librarian listed on that page

  <else-if type="entry-dictionary" match="any">
        <choose>
          <if match="any" variable="abstract">
            <text variable="abstract" font-style="italic"/>
          </if>
          <else>
            <text variable="container-title" font-style="italic"/>
          </else>
        </choose>
      </else-if>
      <else>
        <text variable="abstract" text-case="title" font-style="normal" suffix=" "/>
        <text variable="collection-number"/>
      </else>
    </choose>

JFowler · February 2, 2023

Hi Adam,

I'm the librarian at SEBTS.

It's intentional. In short, our dissertation style guide is a variation on SBL. We require shortened forms of titles in the footnotes and full titles within the bibliography. We didn't see a native way within Zotero to facilitate that, so we improvised and utilized the abstract field to make it happen.

--Jason

adamsmith · February 2, 2023

Hi Jason -- I'd very much recommend against using abstract, as that's getting auto-populated by most databases, so you're imposing a ton of manual removing of data on users in addition to requiring that they get rid of rather useful item information (in addition to creating rather perplexing errors as per the above).

Instead, use the ability of Zotero to pick up data from the extra field as described here and either use a CSL variable like annote or, more elegantly, uses collection-title-short: DW and <text variable="collection-title" form="short"/> in the code.