- probably never included (but printed on the front page). Nor "Contributor" or "Translator" - valid autor types for a thesis - are ever included in citations.

I would suggest enabling "Editor" author type for theses. After all, advisor in most cases does the editing.

Generally I could suggest giving user the freedom to add customary author types ("committee member", why not), but you would probably reject it.

I don't really understand why Zotero has a "contributor" role; seems too vague to be of any use.

The "vagueness" is, I think, advantageous (just as a better strong, base "Document" type should be). Contributor seems to be fine for keeping track of information that ben58 wants to keep track of: it allows him to add people to the record which won't be in the citation. If we decide that intrinsic separation of a person from the role is not needed in this case, he can even store something like "John Doe (advisor)" as a contributor.

It seems that unlike CSL/bibo, Zotero is a research tool ...

I don't agree with this characterization, in part because I'm not sure it's helpful in this discussion.

CSL is clearly about citations.

BIBO has a much wider scope (is in fact more-or-less a superset of Zotero's model). People, places, containers and collections are all treated as discrete things, which facilitates describing and discovering new patterns and relationships, which is what I take to be at the center of the research enterprise.

But just as the needs of citation-styling shouldn't be the only criteria driving these decisions, neither should "the content in a database" be either. Different databases, for example, are created by different communities, with different priorities. Amazon catalogs different data than does the Library of Congress.

I think the real question is what value does any particular structured data offer to the tasks associated with research and publishing (which is what I take to be Zotero's focus)? What value does a new "advisor" contributor type add? Is it useful, for example, to be able to search by advisor? Is it useful for anything else?

he can even store something like "John Doe (advisor)"

Surely I could - I could put any kind of information into any field - but I would strongly dislike it. I mean, "Name" field is for names, isn't it?

any review-of-the-field article, chapter, or book would trace intellectual influences from mentors to their students.

Yes, that's in publications.

And in research (and Zotero is a research tool), the name of advisor can tell me a lot about thesis. I can "certify" research quality (or a probable lack thereof). It can tell me what the work is probably about, what technique(s) were preferebly used, etc.

I understand the reluctance to multiply entities without convincing reasons. Still: what about the compromiss of enabling (the already existing) authorship type "Editor" for theses?

Well but this information is still required in the bibliography

Sorry, I checked my bibliographic style, and I realize there is no need to specify the advisor for a doctoral thesis.

Hi there, we are indeed using Zotero in a pretty large project aiming to build a bibliographic database that also includes quite a lot of master's and doctoral theses.

We want people to be able to find out about who are the people supervising theses in the field we are interested in (digital humanities in Europe). The bibliography is a research bibliography whose main purpose is to be published online as a Zotero Group Library, not for creating lists of references in publications.

For any thesis, the advisor is obviously a very important person. In Germany and France, the thesis advisor(s) (but not all the members of a jury) are routinely included when citing a thesis that has not been published as a book. And the advisor is neither a contributor (he/she is not usually writing any part of it) nor the editor (at least in the fields I know about, the thesis advisor reads the thesis and comments on it, but does not do much editing, neither in the sense of "copy editing" nor in the sense of "publishing").

I realize the strongest argument in these kinds of discussions on Zotero is to include a specific field if it is required by any citation style. However, I find this does not do justice to the much more varied use cases Zotero allows for. After all, the concept and feature of an "online group library" is for sharing bibliographic information independently of creating a list of references in publications.

Right now, we are using tags to record "advisors", and it allows anyone to see a list of advisors and see what theses they have been supervising. But since this is an open list, we think it should be in a field (we use a closed list of tags for most other things). And of course, we could add this information in a note, but I feel using a database is all about having structured information.

(My apologies for the long rumination, just trying to take the previous discussion into account.)

I understand that there has to be a reasonable limit to feature requests to keep the whole thing managable and useful. But I do think the thesis advisor is important, not just for our project.

Just as an example from Canada: There is an important online bibliography on eighteenth century studies, run by Benoît Melançon at the University of Montréal since at least 1992.

The online form for theses, where people can suggest entries for that bibliography, to be checked (and possibly formatted) by the editor of the bibliography, includes the thesis supervisor ("directeur/directrice"). (Note that the form does not include that many or any fancy entries.)

The resulting bibliography, in which quite a lot of theses appear, routinely indicates the supervisor.

Here are the links to the form and to the most recent issue of the bibliography:
http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/melancon/biblio.form.these.html
http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/melancon/biblio192.html

Maybe this example helps.
Btw.: It would be so cool to have that bibliography as a Zotero Group Library!

Thanks, adamsmith!