Upgrade StorageProcess for metadata update and revision?
Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere. I imagine this is a common question but my searches in this forum come up with too many results related to fixing metadata associated with an ISBN/DOI or other lookup, so here goes:
As many comments here have pointed out already it is not uncommon that the zotero metadata is incorrect. There are various ways that i see issues in the metadata, but more problematic mistakes i see occur when the item type (journal article, book, report, web page, publication) is wrong. Specifically many reports and other types of grey literature often come up as books in zotero's metadata. When this happens, even if the publication metadata otherwise correct, the fields associated with a book are different and therefore the entire bibliography or citations generated comes out incorrect, and it takes much more effort to fix.
I'm assuming there is no user based feedback into the system that can update zotero's metadata is there? Is there otherwise another form of general feedback that for users to zotero?
thank you!
As many comments here have pointed out already it is not uncommon that the zotero metadata is incorrect. There are various ways that i see issues in the metadata, but more problematic mistakes i see occur when the item type (journal article, book, report, web page, publication) is wrong. Specifically many reports and other types of grey literature often come up as books in zotero's metadata. When this happens, even if the publication metadata otherwise correct, the fields associated with a book are different and therefore the entire bibliography or citations generated comes out incorrect, and it takes much more effort to fix.
I'm assuming there is no user based feedback into the system that can update zotero's metadata is there? Is there otherwise another form of general feedback that for users to zotero?
thank you!
This page is probably a good entry point to learn about the possible problems and reporting them: https://www.zotero.org/support/known_translator_issues
I encounter this often with metadata for gray literature downloaded from government agencies and non-governmental organizations. When I look at the raw metadata on the publisher's websites, the error in the item type originates from there. It is common for me to see a lengthy report labeled by the agency or organization publisher as a book that may or may not have an ISBN. The publication may or may not have a printed version available. Sometimes these have named authors and other times only an agency or institutional author. Some of these can have a report number from the agency and also an ISBN. Sometimes also they have a DOI. I don't know if there are rules in style guides that declare the proper item classification. I choose an item type that allows me to enter the greatest number of provided ID numbers. But that idea has no sound basis except that I think it improves findability.
It has been standard practice in several nation's universities for doctoral theses to be assigned an ISBN. I've heard it argued that these are more properly labeled as books published by Some University Press. This omits information specific to the thesis type.
Things from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences can be classified as a book or a report depending upon the division that is responsible. Things from the Institute of Medicine are almost always books while items of similar length and quality published by the Transportation Research Board are typically labeled reports. Publications from each division have agency publication identifier numbers, ISBNs, and DOIs.
Other times there can be multiple options for a book section / report / journal article / conference proceeding. What you get upon import depends upon the webpage you visit. My best example of this is when IEEE lists conference proceedings. They can be presented as a journal article in one of their, "Lecture Notes in ..." journals, the same item can be accessed as an conference proceeding from a different webpage, a different webpage will provide this as a book section (with no mention that the book is a conference proceedings). These identical full-text items can have different DOIs.
Ultimately this leaves the user to determine the type - you might choose one for findability, but type also changes how zotero will format the entry when creating a bibliography if you choose to use that function.
So it sounds like this is just an issue to be noted and must be manually fixed by the end user. With a potential solution of choosing a different identifier if one is available?
I get that this would be something that publishers would do for their own reasons, but it leads to lots of different citation information/format across scientific publications when citing the same publication..
What is best practice to cite these types of non-book publications that are technically "books"
For both of these, it's mostly irrelevant if something is a book or a report or how the respective citation is formatted. That's in particular the case when a report is published formally enough to be retrievable using a standard identifier, i.e. relatively easy to obtain. So I just don't think this is something you should spend much time on unless your a cataloging librarian: your citations will be fine.
(ISBNs don't automatically return books, no, but since the B in ISBN stands for book, you're definitely fine citing anything with an ISBN as a book.)