"Journal" and "Journal article" - multiple storage of the same pdf

Christinee
Hi,

I am playing with Zotero since yesterday and so far love it.
But there is one issue I cannot figure out how to avoid it. I have some electronic journals and each of these journals as one single pdf containing - of course - more than one journal articles. It is clear how to add one article in this pdf to Zotero (add notes, attach PDF...). But usually there is more than one article I am interested in and also want to include it in the collection. Is it now necessary to attach the same pdf file which I saved already for the previous article again? Does this mean that in case I find 10 articles useful I have 10 copies saved of the same pdf on my HD?
Or is there maybe a way round?? If not, then maybe one could add the fields "Journal" and "Magazine" to the drop-down menu. Especially also useful for journals and their special editions.

Thanks
  • bdarcus
    I'd say the workaround is to split the PDFs. Or maybe just include links to the combined file?
    maybe one could add the fields "Journal" and "Magazine" to the drop-down menu. Especially also useful for journals and their special editions.
    I don't think that's such a straightforward solution. This can't even be considered until a new (more relational) data model is in place, and even then I think this could be awkward.
  • Christinee
    It is not so easy to split PDFs...especially from commercial sources/vendors. But the hint with the link to the combined file might work well...

    As a librarian I wondered of course why only the "articles" are included and not the journal issue itself but maybe I see the picture too much from a library perspective....however..thanks for the quick reply...
  • bdarcus
    edited December 18, 2007
    There's a plan to move to a more relational model, where rather than having, say, an article with a bunch of essentially dumb fields, you have an article linked to a journal. The journal then becomes a full object.

    Of course, one could make that more complicated/richer by introducing the "issue" intermediate: article ---> issue ---> journal.

    Right now, the focus is on citable objects.This is not how librarians think, I know, but it is how scholars think. So this is appropriate. The challenge, then, is how to mix those different kinds of view in the same UI in ways that don't end up in confusion.

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