Text-based, non-citation notes?

dale.roberts
I'm a happy Zotero user, but there is one thing I can't figure out, and it's making me feel a little stupid. Must be one of those things that is so obvious to everyone that no one ever talks about it!

I simply need to add some text-only, non-citation notes, intermixed with the standard reference citations, and I can't figure out the "accepted" way to do this. I can manually edit the bibliography entry and add text, but then I need a "fake" item in the library for each text note, which seems a little clunky. And if I manually edit, the citation numbers no longer update.

Is there a "right" way to do this?

Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    I'm not sure I understand, which style is that?
    Could you give a more specific example?
    If you're using a numbered style like Vancouver, Nature, or IEEE It sound like you're treating numbered citations like endnotes, which they're very much not.
    If you're using a note-based style like Chicago, you can just use the word processor's footnote/endnote function.
  • dale.roberts
    I'm looking at Science. They specify a References and Notes section at the end of the article, which freely mixes citations and text notes, all numbered sequentially. I'm not sure I understand the distinction between numbered citations and endnotes in this context, as they are all mixed together here.

    I am using Word with the add-ins. If I use Word's Insert Endnote, can I get it to insert the notes w/in the Zotero bibliography and number them correctly?

    I admit I am new to this, and this is the first time I've used Zotero to generate references, so I may just be completely misunderstanding something here (and I don't know all the lingo).

    Thanks for the (VERY) quick reply!

    dale
  • adamsmith
    I see. That's actually not covered by Zotero - I've never seen this practice in any other style (and I've seen a lot of styles).
    Science does a weird thing here - on the one hand, the numbers are treated as notes - thus the "freely interspersed notes" - that could be covered by endnotes (not in the current style, but in general). <i>However</i>, they also use the same number to refer to an article that is cited multiple times every time it's cited - i.e. a numerical bibliography. Endnotes are always increasing, so those won't work for that.

    I can't think of any alternative to using fake items as you describe. If more styles do this, we might have to think about a way to achieve this more elegantly.
  • dale.roberts
    Thanks again for taking time to look into this. At least I don't feel like I missed some obvious mechanism here! I thought this practice of mixing notes and references was more common, but maybe I'm wrong.

    Okay, I just did a very quick and dirty hack, for those that might need it. I edited the .CSL and simply added a <text variable="note"/> tag w/in the layout section. Now it just magically displays the text from the item's "Extra" section. I just leave the other sections blank.

    A better option for the future might be to simply automatically take the "note" text for items of type Note, so you can just use notes directly in the bibliography. But I couldn't figure out how to do that quickly. The quick hack is good enough for now, and will at least allow me to keep my notes and references numbered properly.

    Thanks,
    dale
  • adamsmith
    edited March 1, 2011
    A better option for the future might be to simply automatically take the "note" text for items of type Note, so you can just use notes directly in the bibliography.
    That should happen anyway, no? If you just select a note as a reference, don't you get it's content (and nothing else)? That seems like a pretty decent work-around, actually.

    edit: I think you get the content of the note until the first paragraph/return - that's technically the "title" of the note. Still, that seems workable, no?
  • dale.roberts
    edited March 2, 2011
    Ah, you are right! The notes do just show up in all of the other styles, but NOT when using the Science style! So the problem all along was with the Science style, and not showing the notes per se, and Science was the only one I had looked at.

    So you can just use any stand-alone or child note as a cited, numbered note. Very nice.

    Thanks for your help. I now have a better understanding of what is going on, and this forced me to look at CSL so I could fix the Science style for my needs.

    Great software, I'm not sure how I got along w/out it before (not very well is the answer).

    dale
  • adamsmith
    ah yes - that's because science doesn't print titles except for books.
    That could be achieved, but it's a bit messy, since you can't test for item type note, so what you'd have to do is to test for everything else and then use the residual <else> for notes - I wouldn't want that in the style in the repository, I think, but you could certainly do it for yourself.

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