Upgrade Storagemissing "contributor" options & document types
For lack of a better option, I classify a lot of materials that we cite in our work as "report," because it has most of the fields I need.
Except... for the author/contributors field, it only gives me author/contributor/series editor/translator -- NOT one that comes up all the time in real life, EDITOR. I've tried cheating by putting someone in as "series editor," but if there's no series, it just won't show up.
Also, with websites, we should have the option of adding place & institution (especially institution). There are a lot of Web documents from the government and from think tanks that can be classified as "website," but which I have to turn into "reports" just to get that crucial field.
Lastly, it would be great to add "government document" with appropriate fields (agency instead of institution, and ideally other fields like Endnote provides), as well as something like "paper" that codes similarly to "report." Loads of stuff like that in academia.
Except... for the author/contributors field, it only gives me author/contributor/series editor/translator -- NOT one that comes up all the time in real life, EDITOR. I've tried cheating by putting someone in as "series editor," but if there's no series, it just won't show up.
Also, with websites, we should have the option of adding place & institution (especially institution). There are a lot of Web documents from the government and from think tanks that can be classified as "website," but which I have to turn into "reports" just to get that crucial field.
Lastly, it would be great to add "government document" with appropriate fields (agency instead of institution, and ideally other fields like Endnote provides), as well as something like "paper" that codes similarly to "report." Loads of stuff like that in academia.
Reports should be allowed to have editors and Websites should have institutions and places.
As for "government document" and "paper" - remember that the categories in Zotero have the main purpose to allow correct citation. Additional categorization can be done via tags and collections. For that purpose, most completely unpublished papers are well represented in the "manuscript" category, more formal working papers fit well as "reports".
"Government Documents" does not make sense as a category to me (and I say that as a political scientist). Governments do all type of things - they pass laws and executive orders, they write letters, they issue press statements, and they write reports - all of which (with the possible exception of press statements) can be well captured by respective Zotero categories.
In the interest of keeping data manageable, interchangeable and citeable, there is a strong bias in Zotero development to minimize new categories and new item types. (There is much less of an impediment to add existing categories to existing item types - cf. above).
I agree that reports should have an Editor creator role. Its absence is probably an oversight.
As for websites, there is nothing wrong with using Report for things that happen to be websites. Indeed, I think that the Web Page document type isn't that useful-- we usually can and should characterize the document more specifically, since these days reports, articles, interviews and more more often web pages than not.
Government documents can usually be classified as reports, as you note. Apart from the name of the type and some specific fields, is there anything else that makes Report not work for such documents? Similarly, what precisely does "paper" have that Report needs? The philosophy of Zotero thusfar has been to be conservative with item types and reduce redundancy, as explained in the thread linked to above.
In addition, I'd suggest giving "document" and "manuscript" the same field options as "report" (or none less than "report"). There's nothing lost in doing it, and it would make it easier to ensure that items entered under those categories work well.
It would also be really useful for "Blog" entries. For example, if I'm citing a post from the Bits blog at the NYTimes, I have to have both the blog title & the paper title in my citation (MLA).
This would be a great addition -- in the meantime, anyone have a workaround?
I do NOT agree that "many things that are incidentally webpages are at their core Reports, or Articles". At least no article category is suitable for that. Look at
http://www.bmu.de/english/mobility/electric_mobility/doc/44821.php
- it's neither an encyclopedia article nor a newspaper article nor a magazine article, all these are published in periodicals and the citation styles for these need the data of the periodical, otoh Zotero does not supply a publisher field for any of the "article" types. It's also no report. The best fitting is just web page, but it definitely needs the "publisher" or "institution" field.
Another kinds of web pages are "press release" and "advertisement" which also do not have suitable types in Zotero.
To me, something like this makes sense:
BMU. “General Information: Electric Mobility.” Website of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, May 2011. http://www.bmu.de/english/mobility/electric_mobility/doc/44821.php.
Which can be done by using the Website Title field. Because I think the Website Title can fulfil most of these functions, I'm less sure about wanting a separate publisher field for Webpages than I was a year ago. I'm open to be convinced - but I'd want an example that cannot be handled properly either by the Webpage item type or by one of the other item types as ajlyon suggests above (note that the Webpage type has a "Type" field, too, so it could likely be adapted to work well for press releases, ads, etc.).
A good justification for a publisher on webpage items is that in certain citation styles (MLA, eg.) you get an N.p. after the website title that you can't retroactively fix by adding a publisher. The style is asking Zotero for a publisher, doesn't get one, and spits out the N.p.
In teaching this to undergrads (I'm a librarian), I tell students that webpage items often have an organization/institution responsible for them and that they're the "publisher." Often the publisher and the website title are one and the same, but not always.
This, from the Purdue OWL:
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A Page on a Web Site
For an individual page on a Web site, list the author or alias if known, followed by the information covered above for entire Web sites. Remember to use n.p. if no publisher name is available and n.d. if no publishing date is given.
"Athelete's Foot - Topic Overview." WebMD. WebMD, 25 September 2014. Web. 6 July 2015.
Lundman, Susan. "How to Make Vegetarian Chili." eHow. Demand Media, n.d. Web. 6 July 2015.
--
AFAIK, it's currently not possible to conform to this rule with Zotero. It frustrates my students to no end.