The major problem of that method is that you lose all the flexibility that Zotero could give you if you would put different kinds of data into different fields. To me, it is against the whole point of citation management to fill the publication field with stuff that is not properly part of the publication title, and so to rob Zotero of intelligence about the editor of the volume and the fact that it's a special issue.

My problem is not how to produce a citation in a specific style, but where to input the relevant data in the fields provided by Zotero such that all that data can be juggled by any citation style template to output the citation style I happen to need.

I'm of the opinion that in the case you cite you really don't need to indicate that it's a special issue. But you have to realize that to do what you want the correct way would yield a more complex model. You'd essentially have to make explicit that an article is always published as part of an issue, which is part of a journal (or even volume), each of which has a title. So three separate objects/rows linked together (through, for example, foreign key relations in the database).

Thanks, all. I conclude that I just leave out the information. It is, I agree with Bruce, not urgently needed anyway.

I have been using Zotero (enjoying it) since a long time, and I found the impossibility to archive journal special issues with guest editors limitating. Today I have had finally time to search for a discussion on the topic and found this. I resume it asking if it could be possible to have - along Items types such as Journal Article, Magazine Article, Book Section or Book - also Journal (Special) Issue, on order to archive and cite a Journal in its entirity. Do you think it would be feasible? Thanks for the attention.

Did this ever get added? I've just been using the journal article form, putting down the editors' names, listing the issue title, the words "special issue of" and the journal title in the Publication field, and leaving the "article title" field blank. And figuring that I'll have to go back and edit the final entry.

Good morning everyone.
I’ve come across the same issue as that discussed in this thread.
I’ve just installed the last version of Zotero (7.0.11 64 bit - I missed the released 6 months ago).
I am impressed by the quality and flexibility of the new interface. Good job and thank you the developers team!
But I could not find a simple way to account for the fact a journal article is a contribution to a special issue of a journal.
When the topic of a special issue is that of my field of research, I usually download the full issue an enter each article in Zotero. I create an entry for the special issue itself and add the entries of each article in the “Related list”. But this functionality is just a way to quickly display the articles. The articles are not identified as being contributions to a special issue.
It becomes a problem when I want to cite one of these contributions.
For example, I entered the special issue of the journal “Geodiversitas” dedicated to the ecological changes associated with the “Messinian event” in the Mediterranean Sea.
On the editor website, the recommended way to cite an article from this special issue is as follows:
Van Vliet-Lanoë B., Vandenberghe N., […] . 2002. — Palaeogeographic evolution of northwestern Europe during the Upper Cenozoic, in Néraudeau D. & Goubert É. (eds), Messinian event: palaeobiological and palaeoecological approaches. Geodiversitas 24 (3): 511-541.
As illustrated in this example, a reference to the Special issue, including its title and its editors, who are usually different from the usual editors of the journal, is required.
It looks like the way to cite a Book Section (sometimes called “Contribution”) of an edited book (but as mentioned by mark who initiated the thread in 2008, a Special Issue is not a Book).
As mentioned by bdarcus and sean, to be able to do it properly, a more complex data model would be needed. So, I imagine a substantial development work is therefore required
I’m using Zotero for my personal use. For my professional use, my company provides Citavi, a commercial software, quite powerful despite not as clear as Zotero. It includes an item type called “Special issue”. This specific item type works as a “container” for the different articles (referred to as “Contributions” in the Citavi environment) that compose the Special issue. This might correspond to the “hierarchical data model” referred to by sean.
Note that Citavi differentiate the “Book” which is a reference in itself, from the “Edited Book”, which works as well as a container hosting the different book sections. Therefore, there is no item “Book section” in Citavi as in Zotero. The book sections or book chapters are entered as “Contributions” to an “Edited book”. Another example of “hierarchical data model”.
Bwiernik mentioned that a “Periodical” item was coming in a future version of Zotero.
Will thit item come with a “hierarchical structure” and therefore allow an easy way to cite article from special issues (especially mentioning the title of the issue and its editors)?
When can we expect to have this included in Zotero? Is it already in the pipe?

Thank you @adamsmith for your answer.
Regarding the unit to which a possible “hierarchy” should/could apply, I think we should be pragmatic. I mainly use Zotero (and I imagine it is the same for most users) to ease the research of documents in my personal bibliography, and above all, allow clean and quick citations & generation of bibliographical lists in the work I produce.
In that respect, my personal perception is that the type of document to which a hierarchical structure should apply are those for which two levels of contributors need to be cited: Mainly the author(s) of an article, and the editor(s) of and edited journal issue, or book in which it is published. These two levels are mandatory and required by the journals in which we submit papers. This requirement is there to recognize the editing work, which is significant and represent a significant amount of time.
It is mainly the case for the edited books and special issue of journals on specific thematic (it can be a full volume, especially when the volume includes only one issue). There may be other units to be identified.
It is worth noting that in the case of special issue, the editorial team is usually different from the usual one.

In my specific case, I could obtain the correct format in my bibliographical list only by assigning the type “Book section” to the articles published in a special issue of a journal.
For instance, for a paper from Van Gorsel & Troelstra, published in the special issue “Aspects géodynamiques du passage Miocène–Pliocène en Méditerranée” of the journal “Géologie Méditerranéenne” edited by Orszag-Sperber &. Rouchy, I obtained the entry in my bibliographical list:

Van Gorsel, J., and Troelstra, S.R., 1980, Late Neogene climate changes and the Messinian salinity crisis, in Orszag-Sperber, F. and Rouchy, J.-M. eds., Géologie Méditerranéenne, Marseille, France, Éditions de l’Université de Provence, Aspects géodynamiques du passage Miocène–Pliocène en Méditerranée, v. 7, p. 127–133, doi:10.3406/geolm.1980.1133.

I used the Citation Style “Geology” available in the Zotero repository. This entry meets the requirement from the journal “Geology” from the Geological Society of America; except the issue number which is missing, despite present in the extra – there is not issue number in a Book section).
Indeed, this article is not a Book section. I can leave with that trick, but if a more relevant Type assignation is possible, I would rather use it.
To do so, I tried to add the Type: periodical in the Extra as you suggested. I also did the following to be consistent:
- I put back the (true) item type to “Journal article”
- I put back the issue number (1) in the corresponding field
- I added the following in the Extra:
Type: periodical
Place: Marseille, France
Publisher: Editions de l'Université de Provence
DOI: 10.3406/geolm.1980.1133

But it did not solve my problem. I obtained the following:

Van Gorsel, J., and Troelstra, S.R., 1980, Late Neogene climate changes and the Messinian salinity crisis (F. Orszag-Sperber & J.-M. Rouchy, Eds.): Géologie Méditerranéenne, v. 7, p. 127–133, doi:10.3406/geolm.1980.1133.

All the information I put in the Extra were ignored. I suppose that the Citation style Geology cannot account for the change I made. The issue was ignored as well, despite it was assigned to 1 in the Zotero entry.
Do I have to edit the style to account for them?
I think I reached my limits of a non-advanced Zotero user.
Should it be the case, could you give me advice/suggestions
Thank you in advance for your help.