I don't quite understand. ISSNs are not for articles, they are for the entire periodical, so basically you would copy & paste the ISSN and get the magazine title? That hardly seems a time saver

Please explain further: "if people want a full volume". Zotero has an ISSN field. It is included in several export formats. This ISSN export is essential for my own (probably unique) purposes -- a journal name authority.

It might help if you describe in detail how you hope to use the ISSN. There may be some way to accomplish what you want.

Whole journals (with multiple volumes) have ISSNs. You can enter in ISSN into a library catalog or several bibliographic databases to find information about the publisher, year range, earlier or later titles, etc.

In my own (not-Zotero) database I use ISSNs (print and electronic) as a way to have uniform journal names. When I want to know everything in (or about) a particular journal in my (not-Zotero) online database I can search on the ISSN.

ISSNs are not used in any citation style I know.

In the PubMed database one can enter a journal ISSN into the query box and receive a list of all articles in the database from that journal.

@adamsmith You are correct that I was not requesting ISSN search for Zotero. That said, is it not possible to accomplish something similar using advanced search and publication / journal name? (I haven't tried to do it.)

Interesting discussion, I have a few comments that I hope will be useful.

@spark706 your use case is a book, not a journal. Retrieving all chapters from a book has been requested a number of times in the past, and my guess is that it will probably be developed in a not-too-distant future.

Retrieving a whole journal (or a book series)? This means hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of records. First of all, I don't see how all of them can be relevant. Furthermore, if the metadata is retrieved by crawling the publisher's web site (even worse if all PDFs are downloaded in the process), this will probably be detected as abuse: a typical consequence would be a blocking of your IP address from further access, sometimes blocking your whole organization (depending on the existing licensing contracts). So I really don't see this happening at all.

Obviously databases such as Pubmed and many others allow that kind of search, and that's because they already contain the metadata for all articles, obtained by specific arrangements with many publishers. If you need to search by ISSN, use one of these databases, select the articles that are actually useful and retrieve those. Collecting the whole content to search offline within your own local database isn't really what Zotero is about, in my opinion.

@adamsmith and @aborel, let me ask a different way to see if that helps? I have what I call a journal which is composed of multiple papers, again using the link I provided. In that link to journal I am using as an example the TOC contains nine (9) "chapters" which are in reality nine individual papers pulled together into a single, cohesive unit along with a list of 11 keywords.

How would you two, or any other Zotero knowledgeable people, suggest that I get a list of those nine papers so that I can search for them using the search bar at the top of the Zotero screen?

@adamsmith, you have now stated twice you don't understand the use case I am presenting, so hopefully this last question will make clear what I want. I simply want to have access to either a listing of the nine titles inside the journal OR access to the keywords.

So, as stated at the end of my last posting, How do I gain insight from the journal which has three papers I am interested in using for reference in a project? How would the programmers of Zotero and @adamsmith, etc. suggest that I access that information given that your argument is the ISSN number is useless?

Thanks for the reply but still not answering my question. I have a PDF (many actually) that are similar to the link. Inside each PDF is a journal containing multiple papers of which I am interested in 2 or 3 maybe.

Before people tell me how to do the thing I already know to do and have done with the other 12K papers from my researches, let's please try to answer the question for the use case I asked....please????

Again, without telling me to download an individual paper from the whole, how do I access the parts I want from the whole?

In the same way there there is not Magazine periodical type, only a Magazine Article, how do people who have subscriptions to a magazine, delivered in PDF format, store and access the multiple articles from the magazine????

So, with all sincerity, is there any way to access a list of all the articles in a single PDF file of a journal (or a Magazine even) to access them from within Zotero?

If not, then there is a use case that may be worth evaluating.

Or, just simply let those asking for the ability to access a list of all the articles in a Journal (or Magazine for that matter) that Zotero chooses not to worry about this particular case.

@aborel I am interested in what you are trying to achieve but I still don't think I grasp what it is. I have been working as an indexer of journal articles for more than 30 years and as an indexer of music scores for 20 years before that. My doctorate focus was information-seeking behavior and how professionals use (and misuse) indices to enhance their knowledge and understanding. I know about existing indices and electronic databases, their intended use, and how people (experienced and inexperienced) try to access them. Like Agatha Christy's Miss Lemon, databases are literally in my dreams and nightmares.

I do not yet understand what you are trying to accomplish that cannot already be had with existing features of Zotero.

Do you want to search your Zotero library by ISSN?
Do you want to use Zotero as a front-end to search online databases by ISSN?*
Do you want to use an ISSN as a marker of article relatedness in a grouping?

Try thinking of the ISSN as simply a synonym for a periodical (serial) publication - an 8-digit identifier. ISSNs are particularly useful to disambiguate publications with similar titles. Different ISSNs are also used when published in more than one media type (print, electronic, fiche). [edit: actually, 7 digits--the 8th is a check-digit]

You have acknowledged that the example(s) you have given don't quite illustrate what you desire. Please step back, take a day or two, and restructure your description of your use case. It may be that what you want from a tool is completely outside the scope of Zotero as a research and citation tool. It may be that you can get most of your desire with an existing but different approach.

As to @aborel 's comment concerning magazines. Although (to me) it is essentially useless for all except for high school debate teams; an index to articles from selected popular magazines exists (and has for more than a century). The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature "delivers comprehensive indexing of 300 of the most popular and important periodicals published in the United States and Canada". [ https://www.hwwilsoninprint.com/periodicals.php ]

Until relatively recently this was a quarterly printed index but is now also a part of some EBSCO subscriptions. The print version has an ISSN. Would one be expected to use that index's ISSN to encompass the collected contents of all of the magazines in the index? That would result in millions of individual records.

*You can already search some online databases by ISSN and get the same results as when searching by journal title or abbreviation. For example, searching PubMed with "0028-4793" will find more than 84 thousand items; 0036-8075 will identify more than 184,000 items. Finding those in a database is one thing. I happen to believe that except as a curiosity it is almost useless unless you include additional limiting terms. Trying to download all of the records found from such a massive return will almost surely (as @adamsmith said) have serious negative consequences for you.

So it really did take me until your fourth post to kind of understand what you were trying to do -- please, next time around, start a new thread describing your exact use case and don't post into an existing one assuming things (like, in this case, what an ISSN actually identifies) that you don't fully understand. It wasn't that people were not trying to answer you, but rather that you managed to confuse people who have literally answered more than 10 thousand questions about Zotero by talking around the issue and complaining rather than just describing what you were trying to do.

So now that (I think) I know what you're after, I can give you clear answers:

So, with all sincerity, is there any way to access a list of all the articles in a single PDF file of a journal (or a Magazine even) to access them from within Zotero?

That's not a common use case (I don't think I've actually seen this requested before) and there's nothing easy and there likely won't be in the future. Specifically, there are two separate scenarios:
1) As in the scenario above, the PDF and the individual items within it have DOIs. For that case, it would be technically feasible to let you import the individual items, but you can also just follow the DOI to the webpage of the book and then use the web translator/folder icon to import the chapters you're interested in. That's maybe one click more than going through add by identifier, so the added value of adding it there is small and it would make the 'add by identifier' process more messy by adding a selection dialog.
2) In other scenarios, where the individual items do not have DOIs -- such as, I imagine, many e-mags delivered as PDFs -- this would be eminently useful, but it's technically impossible since there is no viable place where the item (i.e. chapter or article) information gets recorded that Zotero could query.

I hope that clarifies this.