differentiate conference contributions: proceedings, slide show, poster

[wilfriedh]

Up to now there is only the item type "Conference Paper". Now consider

• A manuscript has to be submitted to the program committee. This manuscript may also be published as preprint on the author's website. The item type "manuscript" has the field "Type:" which may contain "paper submitted to ..." which is correctly inserted with the APA style.
• The committee decides whether the manuscript is rejected, or accepted as oral presentation, or accepted as poster presentation.

So there are four types of possible conference contributions:

• If proceedings are published, the text printed in the proceedings. This matches the current item type "Conference Paper", which is called "Conference Proceedings" in Endnote and "CONF" in RIS.
• If no proceedings are published, but the text e.g. supplied as a handout at the conference, this would match the item type "Conference Paper" in Endnote and "CPAPER" in RIS, but has no match in Zotero.
• If accepted as oral presentation, the slide show presented.
• If accepted as poster presentation, the poster presented.

How to store and cite the last three? "Conference Paper" in Zotero does not have the field "Type". "Presentation" is supported in none of the default styles and inconsistently in some translators, e.g. in ReferBibIX.js it maps to "report", in RDF.js it maps to "event". Moreover, in CSL it maps to "speech", see http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/csl-fields/index.html .

The differentiation could either be achieved by activating the "Type" field for conferencePaper - however the current formatting for conferencePaper matches printed proceedings, which often have an ISBN/ISSN, a publisher, a place published, and are available from libraries, and does not match the other types which are most often only available online or from the author. Or it could be achieved by adding more item types. I am not sure what would be better, so, please, comment on this.

[nschneid]

Ideally (in my view) it would be possible to group multiple citeable documents within each item, and each would be associated with a type. So a "conference" item might be cited in several ways through child documents (or placeholders, if the actual documents are unavailable) for the abstract, the paper, the slides or poster, the oral presentation, etc. (Or maybe it would be simpler to call these "subitems", under which the documents themselves can be inserted.)

The ability to cite child elements could also facilitate other functionality, like the ability to retrieve sourced passages/quotations from the item as a whole. http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15235/citavi-like-behaviour

[added:] A related use case would be for edited collections. For instance, creating items for several chapters of the same book can require a great deal of repetitive effort. If those chapters could be included as child items, the work as a whole or its individual chapters could be cited while maintaining an intuitive grouping in the library. However, unlike the above use cases, where the child element simply adds/refines a small number of metadata fields relative to its parent, this one would involve having child elements whose item type is fundamentally different from its parent's—e.g. book vs. book chapter.

[bwiernik]

Any of the three examples that are not published in a proceedings should be cited as a Zotero Presentation/CSL speech.