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zotero / zotero-bits

CSL-related community feedback for Zotero
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Allow page to be valid field for book #84

Closed mvolz closed 5 years ago

mvolz commented 5 years ago

Page does not appear to be a valid book type, but for our use case it would be useful. It's an ongoing complaint for us that Google books links, which include the page as a query parameter, doesn't end up in the citation. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T160848

I know there's probably use cases where it makes sense NOT to include the page, but might be worth at least having the field?

adam3smith commented 5 years ago

The Zotero data model distinguishes between an item and a citation. If you think about it in the context of academic writing, you would cite a book, potentially multiple times, with different page numbers, across a single article (each of these a citation). You would then only include one single entry to the book (the item), without any page number, in the bibliography.

"Page" as the CSL variable is intended to describe the item as a whole. It's a page range and as such doesn't typically make sense for a book.

For citations, Zotero/CSL have the concept of a locator, which is specific to a given citation (and can be of different types: page, chapter, column, verse, etc.). That would seem to correspond to the google book page here. Since it's specific to a citation, it makes no sense to extract that information when importing an item -- I'm afraid allowing this will cause more problems than it solves.

I'm not sure if Citoid could be made to work around this for its purposes.

mvolz commented 5 years ago

I figured something similar was the case, but thanks for the detailed response!