Extra-Field with content "series:" assigns Values to emtpy Variable "Collection-Title"

NarriNarro
Hello everybody,

i am developing my own style that will use the variable "Collection-title" (like "Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition (author-date, Deutsch" does).

Case:
I add item by id: 10.1007/978-3-658-28006-2_1 (it is a book-section).
Result: Field "series" is empty. Field "Extra" contains "Series Title: Edition HMD".
In the bibliography "Edition HMD" appears.

This is the result of my tests:
By default, if the “Series” field is empty, the collection-title variable is populated with the value after “Series Title:” in the “Extra” field. If i enter something in the field "Series", the "Extra"-Field will not assign the variable "Collection-Title".

However, I would prefer that collection-title remains empty unless I explicitly enter something in the “Series” field. Is there a way to prevent Zotero from using the “Extra” field to populate "collection-title"?

Thank you.
Yours
Narri
  • AbeJellinek
    edited 8 days ago
    Colon-separated "Key: Value" lines in Extra will populate the corresponding Zotero fields. No way to turn that behavior off. If you want to prevent it, use a different format (like "[Key]: Value") or use keys that aren't Zotero field names.
  • NarriNarro
    Thank you very much for your help. I understand now that I cannot prevent Zotero from reading the "Extra" field and looking for keywords there. If I understand your suggestion correctly, you're recommending not to use keywords in the "Extra" field.

    The problem, however, is that I’m not the one filling in the "Extra" field—it’s populated automatically when I import an item via ID. As far as I understand, the bibliographic data comes from CrossRef.

    My conclusion is that after importing from CrossRef, I have to manually clean up the keywords from the "Extra" field.

    Any feedback or advice would be very welcome – thanks again!
  • emilianoeheyns
    The translator puts it there because it has found relevant data (like series title) that the chosen item type does not have a native field for, but which *can* be used in citations. So rather than dropping this data silently, it will be put in the extra field.

    The only way to prevent this is to modify your local copy of the Crossref translator.
  • bwiernik
    The best approach is probably to edit your citation style rather than deleting data from the item.
  • emilianoeheyns
    That will be a lot more robust.
  • adamsmith
    Right, but will only work if they don't actually want to use the Series title. I do think Zotero can be overzealous saving some of the variables into Extra. This one is worth taking a look at, though I do recall that CrossRef is treating series a bit oddly.
  • emilianoeheyns
    Don't want to use it for that particular item type, I take it.

    But maybe then a preference whether or not to safe stuff to the extra field? Assuming this is a wider issue, this would amaddress it all at once and would also not require any translator changes.
  • dstillman
    We can probably just disable saving fields to Extra altogether once we've added new fields, because the real fields will represent the fields we think should actually exist for a given type.
  • dstillman
    (The downside of that, of course, is that it would be discarding some data that upstream services did include. I don't know what Crossref's intention is for this field.)
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