"Personal communication" as entry for new item
I would have liked to have "Personal communication" as an entry for a new reference.
Now, the closest I come is "Interview", but I would have liked automated generation of the name of the person I communicated with, the affiliation of the person, the date of communication and that "personal communication" pops up in the bibliography.
Regards,
Jörn Schneede
Umeå
Sweden
Now, the closest I come is "Interview", but I would have liked automated generation of the name of the person I communicated with, the affiliation of the person, the date of communication and that "personal communication" pops up in the bibliography.
Regards,
Jörn Schneede
Umeå
Sweden
Another not that uncommon reference type is "Unpublished result".
So ask yourself, what is an "unpublished result"? What properties would describe it? Does an existing type like "Manuscript" contain those properties?
"Unpublished result" may be knowledge, which has been distilled from some measurements, computations and discussions, but not yet put into a publication, and probably at the moment not even intended for a publication for some reasons. "Personal communication" is approximately the same, but done by a colleague.
What may differ these two from "100 or more different types" is that they are commonly used in citations.
"Letter" is not normally used as a reference type in natural sciences (I've never seen), so if you insist I'd save the reference as a letter, keeping in mind (and as an attached note) that a letter has never existed as such.
In the same way I would save an "Unpublished results" reference as a "Manuscript", even though I know the manuscript has never existed.
Just a bit of doublespeak - and the problem can be solved.
Well, for "Personal communication", I'd join schneede, who started the discussion: listed the fields
- and the Title, of cause.
For "Unpublished results", which is similar - the Author(s), their Affiliation, and the Title. The Author field can be empty, meaning the results are mine.
[28] SJJMF Kokkelmans and EGM van Kempen (personal communication).
The search for (physical.review unpublished-results) also produced some 2500 hits, the percentage of proper references is apparently lower, but there are also quite a few:
[11] Q. Guo, FS Pierce, and SJ Poon, unpublished results
Zotero items need to make sense across disciplines and fields. So, letters, emails, interviews, presentations, all work OK. They are all somewhat self explanatory things which can be handled differently in different styles, but personal communication seems so vague that different fields make use of fundamentally different ideas about what they are and what info they need.
It is best to not get hung up on what something is called. Find an item that includes the fields you need, and gets styled the way you need it styled, and use it. In Zotero manuscripts are generally considered to be unpublished documents, if it has the fields you need just go for it. Similarly, the document item is a generic container.
In BIBO, FWIW, we distinguish between personal communications (a chat in the hallway or a phone conversation?), and personal communication documents. We then have things like letters as a subclass of the latter.
Thanks again for the development. Zotero is working very sweetly for me at the moment.
Thus it is probably easier to simply type the citation.
Joseph.