7.0.31 New Fields Advice

sdflewrit783 · 2026-01-13T11:13:12+00:00

Great to see the new fields, and the migration from Extra seems to have worked. Was a bit of a surprise, so some questions:

1. Any advice about usage? Will the styles know what to do? Anything to pay attention to?
2. Is there complete documentation of all changes to fields?
3. What happens in groups when people might run different versions of Zotero?

Thanks.

damnation · 2026-01-13T11:42:03+00:00

1. Styles will know what to do. For a .csl style it doesn't matter if the variable is stored in the extra field or is now in a dedicated field. nothing will change regarding this.

dunning · 2026-01-13T11:45:39+00:00

There's is a very helpful chart of how the fields map to style variables by @damnation here:

https://pobrien333.github.io/zot2csl/

See the CSL specification for how the styles use these variables:

https://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#appendix-iv-variables

I've just noticed a bug in the new original publication fields, which are not mapped to the corresponding CSL variables. I've submitted a fix for this.

dunning · 2026-01-13T12:13:06+00:00

It looks as if the medium variable isn't being moved into the Format field for the types that now have it (e.g. on a book or dataset).

sdflewrit783 · 2026-01-13T14:03:12+00:00

Thanks both. Very useful.

One thing that comes to mind is the references where some hacky ways were used to record information using Extra field for missing data types and edge cases.

Ideally, one would want to be warned before migration and/or have a log of what was moved where. Or is there a way to know?

dstillman · 2026-01-14T03:19:39+00:00

It looks as if the medium variable isn't being moved into the Format field for the types that now have it (e.g. on a book or dataset).

Fixed in the latest beta — thanks.