default settings for undefined item types

dclarke
Hello, all. I have a particular kind of document (in this case, Chinese legislation, but that's not relevant) that doesn't fit well, given the information I want to show up in the cite, into any existing category of item type. (I'm using OSCOLA as slightly modified by me.) Thus, I am classifying it as "Document". My understanding from other parts of the Zotero documentation is that many citation styles in Zotero don't have a defined style for "Document". This must mean they are reverting to some kind of global default setting, because they do produce a citation in a particular style for items I have labeled in that way. I have been able to tweak part of the way items labeled "Document" appear by inserting a specific instruction in the modified style. But it would be easier if I could find wherever the global default formatting instruction is for "Document" and then play with that.

If it helps, the specific problem I'm having is that items labeled "Document" in subsequent citations come in the form "Author, '[short title]' ([note number]) [page cite]". Since the full reference is already pointed to by the note number in parens, there is no need for the text that I inputted in the "Short Title" field when I created the reference, and I don't want it. The information there makes sense to me but not to anyone else.

Apologies if this is hard to make sense of. I may have used the wrong technical terms in places.
  • dclarke
    In other words, as far as the information in the "Short Title" field is concerned, I want the style to treat Documents the same way it treats Books and Journal Articles: ignore it. It's not needed in OSCOLA, because OSCOLA, in subsequent citations, always points you to the note where the full citation appears.
  • aborel
    I might be wrong, but wouldn't it be easier to use a more specific document type so that the normal style can work its already available magic? "Statute" looks like the best fit in this case, did it not work for your purpose?
  • dclarke
    If that would work, I would have tried it. I have not found an alternative item designation that gives me the information I want in the form I want. "Statute" is not at all a good fit when dealing with Chinese legislation. I won't go into all the reasons here, but trust me that it would make things easier for me if I could just find out the answer to the question as posed: how do I get any particular style (in this case, OSCOLA) to stop citing the Short Title in subsequent citations of items labeled "Document"? This is a mistake in the current style definition, because it's redundant and unnecessary, and OSCOLA doesn't call for it.
  • aborel
    > "Statute" is not at all a good fit when dealing with Chinese legislation.
    It would definitely be interesting to know why it isn't, so maybe this can be fixed for the whole community. That would be the ideal solution in my opinion, so it would be great if you could actually take the time to list your reasons so that someone could work on it.

    As for your question, I don't think there is a universal way to do what you are asking for an arbitrary style, it really depends on how the authors have designed their styles. In oscola.csl, I think the call to macro="title-short" on line 600 is probably producing the short title in your case. The macro itself starts on line 204, I guess it can be modified to behave the way you want (but I'm not an expert so I'm not sure how to do that).
  • dclarke
    Thanks - so does every style define somewhere what to do with any item type whose output format is not specifically defined? Or is it somehow baked into Zotero so they don't need to do it? I'm just curious how Zotero knows what to do with some item type whose output format is not specifically defined in the style one has chosen. Anyway, I'll look for the "title-short" macro and see what's been done there.

    The issue with Chinese legislation is that the information about a particular piece of legislation that you would want to input and that would help the reader understand who issued it, when, and where to find it is just totally (and not surprisingly) different from what the "Statute" item type calls for. OSCOLA says nothing about it, and what the BB says is incredibly complicated and unnecessary, in addition to being premised on physical access to a library with physical Chinese law resources, whereas it's way simpler to find the legislation at a reliable website, archive to perma.cc, and cite to the archived version's URL. (Nobody in China uses physical print versions, and unlike in the US, the reference information for the physical print version is unrelated to the information you need to find it online.) All you need to tell the reader what they need to know is who issued it, what it's called, when it was issued, and where they can find the full text (a URL not subject to link rot).
  • dclarke
    Aha. I think I have discovered the problem. It's a disambiguation function. Suppose I cite John Smith for Article X in fn 5 and the same guy for Article Y in fn 7. In fn 10, I cite Smith, Article X again. All the footnote needs to do is to point to Smith's article in fn 5 (in BB, we'd say "Smith, supra note 5"). But the OSCOLA style definition thinks there's ambiguity there that needs resolving because it sees another article by the same guy in footnote 7, so it supplies a short title. Actually, there would only be ambiguity requiring a short title if there were multiple articles by the same person in the same footnote. But this is WAY too complicated for me to attempt to fix myself, so I'll just manually correct the citations when I do my final edit.

    On another topic: the reason this creates problems for me is that I use the "Short Title" field for another purpose: just to provide a quick and dirty, unambiguous abbreviation for the source in question so that when I'm writing, I can pop it into the text without worrying about anything else. And then I can quickly find the source again in Zotero by inputting the Short Title I created. It would be great if Zotero could create a field especially for this kind of private use. I know the "Extra" field is already there, and I use that as well, but I also need the "Extra" field for other types of extra information, and it would just be a little more convenient to have a dedicated field for the user's own abbreviated title for the source.

    To give an example, suppose I have an article by four authors -- my abbreviation will just be "[FirstAuthorSurname] [Year]z", the added "z" telling me that this source is stored in Zotero, not Endnote (which I used before Zotero and where I have a lot of stuff stored). If there are duplicate author surnames, I just add a, b, c etc. directly after the year. Thus I can unambiguously indicate the source as I'm writing, and unambiguously and quickly find it in Zotero after.

    If you're thinking, "Hey, it's not THAT much work to enter the Zotero code while you're writing," well, (a) I find it distracting even if others may not, and (b) I'm not always composing in Word. I use Scrivener a lot, and for that I need a quick and unambiguous way to point to a source. After I convert the Scrivener document to Word for final editing, then I input the Zotero codes.
  • aborel
    edited August 4, 2024
    If you want to know what I'm thinking, I feel you're piling up many smaller, quick (maybe dirty, no judgement from me, I've not the same thing often enough), partial solutions to work around one slightly different source problem that could perhaps be resolved more directly :-) That's all right, we've all been there! You're also re-purposing Zotero fields, which is guaranteed to have unexpected results at some point.

    Let's assume you're using the Statute document type (which should map to "legislation" in CSL if I understand correctly). Would it work for your purpose if a suitable URL is included in the record? There's a field for that, and it seems to me that the OSCOLA style should pick it up correctly.
  • dclarke
    Right - I appreciate your willingness to suggest stuff. I would in principle like to try to make Statute work, because some day I might want to differentiate those items from other things just labeled Document. But I found that labeling them "Statute" also required a lot of tweaking. For example, "Statute" just lists the year but not the full date of enactment, and I want the full date to show. "Statute" also doesn't provide a URL. (I can input the URL, but OSCOLA doesn't output it.) Legal styles just aren't used to providing URLs for legislation; it's not a standard practice because in the US and UK there's a standard way of referring to legislation (e.g., "16 USC 1458" that tells the reader how to find it both in print and on line. Thus, after sampling a bunch of different ways in different OSCOLA styles to label Chinese statutes (statute, report, manuscript, web page, presentation, etc.), I found that calling them "Documents" would require the least tweaking to get what I wanted.

    Incidentally, the issue of the unwanted Short Title is quite different from the issue of how to label statutes. I take your point about using fields for unintended purposes; that's why I hope the Zotero developers can add another field like the "Extra" field that's just for the use of users and can be used for the purpose I mentioned (a quick and unambiguous abbreviation for the source). Maybe just add a few more "Extra" fields--e.g., Extra1, Extra2, Extra3--to allow users a little more scope for things nobody ever anticipated. The reason I used this field in Zotero was in anticipation of copying some or all of my Zotero bibliography over to Endnote. I discovered that if I tried to do so, Zotero's "Short Title" field would always map onto Endnotes "Short Title" field, which I use for my personal abbreviations. (I'm also misusing it in Endnote!) Thus, I couldn't really use it for its intended purpose in Zotero.

    One of these days I'll figure out how to fix everything...
  • adamsmith
    Thanks - so does every style define somewhere what to do with any item type whose output format is not specifically defined?
    Yes, basically, at least every well written one
Sign In or Register to comment.