actually this might be possible now, at least without the sub headings (which could then be added at the end). I'll see what I can get, but that will take a while.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the OP is actually asking for a sectioned bibliography. Sorting seems rather orthogonal.

Well, for one thing, the types descriptions people typically use to divide a sectional bibliography often don't have a very strong relation to the Zotero or CSL types.

I thought Frank had some experimental code for sectional bibs?

@bdarcus, Yes, that's actually embedded in citeproc-js itself. It would take some work in the plugins and in the UI to hook it up.

@mccorkell: The idea would be to do a rough sort of the bibliography that pretty much clusters the material in each of your target categories together (then sorting by author or date or whatever the style requires). You could then freeze a copy of the document at the last stage of production by deleting Zotero codes, and insert the headings and whatnot by hand. For the reasons given above, it's not really recommended (not because it's dangerous or anything, but because it's non-standard). The code for it would look like this (right below the <bibliography> tag):<sort>
<key variable="type"/>
<key macro="author"/>&lt;!-- or whatever --&gt;
</sort>No guarantees, but it seems like it might work.

@mccorkell - sorry about that. I was sort of doing a more technical sidebar to see if we really understood what you are asking for. Do you agree that you want a sectional bibliography (different sections, with different headings, for different types of sources)?

If yes, I frankly don't think Zotero supports this now, and that it's probably easier to just manually reshuffle the bibliography after you're done with the document.

I have the same request as Risikio, but simplified. I would only want a separate section for the Statutes and the Cases. Everything else is the residual section. These types certainly exist in Zotero and CSL. Would this also be impossible with the current CSL?

Thanks!

but yes, it is possible - if you want to do it yourself, create a macro (anywhere among the other macros)

<macro name="type-sorting">
<choose>
<if type="case statute" match="any">
<text value="1"/>
</if>
<else>
<text value="2"/>
</else>
</choose>
</macro>

and then, in the
section of the bibliography, which currently looks something like this:
<sort>
<key macro="author"/>
<key variable="title"/>
</sort>
add the macro as the first parameter, i.e.
<sort>
<key macro="type-sorting"/>
<key macro="author"/>
<key variable="title"/>
</sort>
See here for general instructions on style changes:
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step

I think the question Bruce raises is not whether this should be possible - which it clearly should - but how. For example, if we keep this in csl, you won't be able to sort by tag or collection etc.

The alternative would seem to me to, for example, handle this in the word-plugin - maybe as part of an edit-bibliography dialogue, where you could specify how many bibliographies to create, what sub-headings they should have, what they should be sorted by and, if desired, move items between bibliographies. I understand Bruce as proposing something along those lines.

Type-based sectioning would also be very nice for generating CVs.

While adamsmith's workaround is pretty neat, I guess it would be helpful if you could also define section headers. E.g. (not claiming this is a good idea), we could add a cs:sections element, similar to cs:sort. E.g.

<bibliography>
<sections>
<section type="book thesis" header="Books"/>
<section type="article-journal" header="Peer-reviewed Journal Papers"/>
<section header="Other"/>
</sections>
</bibliography>

The contents of each section would then be subject to the general sorting algorithm defined with cs:sort.

Bruce has said many times his belief that citation styles should not rely on item types. I don't know to what extent that is possible but I'm sure that zotero items should not be taken too seriously/strictly: it's a matter of flexibility.

However, bibliographies sorted by types are quite common (at least in France). What I suggest is to rely on tags-saved searches or collection with a support of citeproc-js.

ATM, you can put items in different collections ("Primary source"/"Secondary source") and then generate a bibliography. But it lacks automaticity: user must have put all items he cites in a collection (or tags) and create his bibliography from zotero ui.
Do you think that would be possible (and desirable) to rely on collections/saved searches in order to create bibliographies sorted by types?
With this option selected (e.g: something like "sort-by-collections=yes" like particle management in csl 1.0), the processor will generate the bibliography when one clicks on the "Zotero insert bibliography" but after having checked that cited items belongs to differents collections.

The problem is that we don't use collections/tags only for that. A dialog could be useful in order to let the user decide which collections have to be taken into account.

I'm too slow: my idea is close to what adamsmith said, I think.

part of an edit-bibliography dialogue, where you could specify (...) what they should be sorted by

That could be partly automated if the plugin relies on collections/saved searches as I said.

Hi,

why dont´t a <text value="3"/> or 4 or 5... worked?
it would be great

Is somebody working on the type sorting issue? ;)

thank you for your great work


<macro name="type-sorting">
<choose>
<if type="book thesis" match="any">
<text value="1"/>
</if>
<if type="article-journal article-newspaper" match="any">
<text value="2"/>
</if>
</choose>
</macro>

I have problems using code snippets from here to get the following ordering: 1) not public 2) publicly available/accessible 3) published
Here the my code
<macro name="sort-key-bibliogroup">
<choose>
<if variable="archive archive_location URL" match="any">
<text value="2"/>
</if>
<else-if variable="publisher edition" match="any">
<text value="3"/>
</else-if>
<else>
<text value="1"/>
</else>
</choose>
</macro>
<bibliography ... >
<sort>
<key macro="sort-key-bibliogroup"/>
<key macro="sort-keysort-key"/>
<key variable="issued"/>
</sort>
The output was weird; I couldn't recognize a ordering - it was looking like the ordering was coming from the ordering in the Zotero window.

@ChristianR: Have you validated your style?

http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles

It does work now; the macro sort-key has to be limited on:
<macro name="sort-key">
<text macro="contributors-sort" suffix=" "/>
</macro>
Before there I had the date variable.