Victor--which Chicago style are you using and are you using a public style or a development style? They've been updated at different times. Chicago note w/o bibliography and Chicago Full Note w/ Bibliography in the Dev section should cite number of volumes and volume number: http://www.zotero.org/styles/

Please give examples of citations where commas are placed incorrectly so we can fix the styles.

Thanks!

Please go to http://www.zotero.org/styles/, scroll down to the Dev Styles section, and click on [Install] next to Chicago Manual of Style (Full Note with Bibliography) to install the latest version of the style. Let me know if you still have problems after that.

When you enter the information are you only enter the book once in the section marked Volume do you put 1 thru 3 (if there are three volumes) or are you adding the book 3 times and each time putting a 1,2,or 3 into the section for volumes to distinguish it from the other books?

This is really up to you. You can enter the book once and put the number of volumes in the "# of Volumes" field, or you can enter each volume separately and enter each volume number in the Volume field.

Okay in this case you should enter one entry for all volumes in bibliography, entering 3 in the "# of volumes" field. Then, when you cite the work in Word, enter 1:200 in the locator field (i.e., always enter volume number with the pages).

Please update the style again at http://www.zotero.org/styles/ before trying this.

Yes, currently titles of multivolume works are not supported--this will be available when hierarchical item types are implemented.

I, too, would like to be able to cite multivolume works where the individual volumes have titles different from the title of the whole work. The best workaround I've found so far is to enter the title of the whole work in the Series field and make minor edits. Is there a better way?

Any ETA on when hierarchical item types will be implemented?

Regarding the last example, you should use Book Section for that entry (make a duplicate of the book, choose Book Section in the drop-down menu in Info and fill in the title and author). Using Chicago Manual of Style you'll get:
Carson, D. A. “Mystery etc.” In Paradoxes etc., edited by Mark A. Seifrid, 393-436. Justification etc. 2. Grand Rapids: Baker.
If you want the "<title> 2" to be "Vol. 2 of <title>" and "393-436" to be "Pages ... of" it's not at all impossible, but you have to do some hacking in your style csl-file.

Should the Harvard style show vol # / # of volumes in a bibliography? Currently, it doesn't seem to. Using the basic 'Harvard Reference 1 Format'. e.g., for a book section from vol 1 of 9, I get:

Watts, I., 1813. The Privilege of the Living Above the Dead. In The Works of the Rev. Isaac Watts D.D. in Nine Volumes. Leeds: Edward Baines, pp. 533-581.

This is to echo the desiderata expressed above for more support in the area of multivolume works, and to provide a knotty, but rather common, example from my field.

Every four years the international conference on patristic studies convenes. Like clockwork, the proceedings are published, nearly each time by a different publisher. The proceedings are titled Studia Patristica, and each conference produces four or five volumes. Those volumes are numbered sequentially (as if SP is an ongoing multivolume work), but sometimes a volume is split into several subvolumes. Each volume and subvolume has its own title, even its own editors. But the title that is best known by scholars is that of Studia Patristica. Furthermore (as if this weren't complicated enough) a publisher for a given set ofproceedings might incorporate the SP volumes they've been assigned into another series they publish.

What the average scholar in the field wants to see, as far as a footnote reference, is something like one of these two options:

• John W. Watt, "The Syriac Adapter of Evagrius' Centuries," Studia Patristica 17, no. 3 (Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press, 1982), 1388-95.
  
• John W. Watt, "The Syriac Adapter of Evagrius' Centuries," Studia Patristica 17 (Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press, 1982), 3:1388-95.
  

That's really about all a busy scholar wants to read. No subtitle of the volume in question (Athanasius, Cappadocian Fathers, Chrysostom, Augustine and his Opponents, Oriental Texts). No Roman numerals (its appearance on the title page is a publisher's conceit). And the Arabic numeral should not be set in italics, so it's clear that a volume is being referred to. And the place of publication and the name of the press is very helpful.

In Zotero, if you enter this record as a journal article, you cannot supply publisher information. If you enter it as a book section you are faced with dissatisfying choices. The best approach seems to be to put under Book Title Studia Patristica 17 or some variant. But this ensconces the volume number in the title itself, when really it is metadata. It complicates, if not altogether thwarts, efforts to abide by CMS (16th ed.) 14.121-27, 14.154.

Studia Patristica is but one of a number of humanities publications that can be classified by intelligent readers as multivolume books, series, or serials. And entering information on these chimeras proves as challenging as the example above. Any support Zotero developers can give to this feature in a future version would be greatly appreciated.

I don't know if that's really the case, Bruce. "Book" and "book section" and "conference proceeding" already have the volume and # of volumes available. This thread highlights the fact that many styles need to be amended to take advantage of that information.

One might ask if a (sub-volume or "issue") number should be added to the database, to address Arithmeticus's use case. I'm not sure. But, it seems "less bad" to subvert the already available volume field and using a style that will export that volume, rather than to either (I would argue) mis-type a reference or to subvert the title field.

Placing Volume="17, no.3" in a conference proceeding leads to the following citation, generated by Zotero using the Chicago style:

Watt, John. “The Syriac Adapter of Evagrius' Centuries.” In Studia Patristica, 17, no. 3:1388-95. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press, 1979.

this looks like a journal article with a publisher and and place

It looks, to me, like a conference proceedings. Esp. because of the comment "Every four years the international conference on patristic studies convenes. Like clockwork, the proceedings are published, nearly each time by a different publisher."

Yes, this may be periodic in time (many conferences are), but it has no other marks of the modern journal (published multiple times throughout a single year, under a single publishing house) & lacks the publication-specific (e.g. ISSN) and article-specific identifiers (e.g. DOI) that have become commonplace. We have a "conference proceeding" type & Studia Patristica passes the duck test to use that type.

Perhaps we should change some types to include more fields, but to argue that the journal article type should be changed so we can add an object which is not only NOT a journal article, but for which there is ALREADY a type in Zotero and CSL is just interface pollution.

Any improvements in sight for multivolume works where each volume has a separate book title? In humanities where you have all kind of 'Complete Works', this is quite common.

Yeah, but there's a considerable difference between "this will certainly come with 4.2" and "this might come some day, once 4.2 has been released".

For the time being, entering the volume title along with the number in the Volume field (ala "3: Management Psychology") works well in most cases (though, obviously, styles requiring different formatting for volume numbers and titles don't work).