7.0.31 New Fields Advice

sdflewrit783
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
    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
    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
    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
    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 Zotero Team
    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.
  • jvoros
    edited 3 days ago
    I was wondering about how to go about storing translated titles of translated works which are cited in their original language. This suggests separating the two forms of title into separate fields. Note this is not the same as the Original Title, since that *is* the title to be used in the citation. It would seem that a Translated Title would be needed to hold the translation, but I don't seem to be able to find such a field defined in CSL.

    At the moment, the workaround is to place the translated title into [square brackets] after the actual title in the Title field, but this could conceivably suffer from incorrect capitalisation due to the Language field, and/or incorrect inclusion within quotation marks. Example:

    Einstein, Albert. 1925. “Einheitliche Feldtheorie von Gravitation und Elektrizität [Unified field theory of gravitation and electromagnetism].” Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 414–19.

    In this case the capitalisation worked, since the translated title is rendered with Sentence cap.

    Anyone with any ideas for how to hack this?
  • dunning
    @jvoros There is no workaround for the lack of a translated-title variable in the current version of CSL that can give correct formatting. The least worst option is to use the genre variable, i.e. storing it in Extra as genre: Translation of the title. This field is however necessary for holding a description of the item, so you'll get the brackets in APA due to its structure but not anywhere else.
  • jvoros
    edited 3 days ago
    @dunning - Excelsior! For the moment that will do nicely. Since I predominatly use Chicago, I'll store it with the [square brackets]. It will be a simple matter to seek out all instances of Genre in Extra at some later date, should translated-title end up being introduced into CSL and Zotero.

    Of course, this doesn't work for a Translated Booktitle as well, such as:

    Schmidt, Johannes F.K. 2015. “Der Zettelkasten Niklas Luhmanns als Überraschungs generator.” [The Zettelkasten of Niklas Luhmann as a surprise generator]. In Serendipity: Vom Glück des Findens. [Serendipity: The joy of discovery], edited by F. Meschede. Snoeck, Köln.

    The kludge for this is to use Edition, with the square brackets. Series Title doesn't place correctly. Fine if there is no edition info...
  • dunning
    It’s on the list of things that I need as well. I would expect that there will be a new version of CSL with the variable before the end of 2026.
Sign In or Register to comment.