Adding new default reference Types

[Jon]

I'm thinking of adding new references Types to the default installation. For example, Conference Paper (to be distinguished from the existing Conference Proceedings, which is the book). I'm looking for other Types that users would find useful.

If there are Types we don't include and that would be useful to you, please suggest them. It would also be useful if you listed field labels where they would differ from the defaults (for example, for the Patent Type Authors become Inventors).

Jon
Sonny Software

[nh220]

I think a Dataset type might be helpful to many (based on how often I see students ask about citing datasets and it is a frequent request on Zotero's formers).

Some legal types might be useful, such as Treaty and Case. If you want to go down that route, Jon, I am happy to share how I have set these up.

[Jon]

Yes, please do. I wouldn't know which labels would be change to what. Note that Bookends won't do a decent job with BlueBook types of references (scanning, I mean). But as a reference source it should be OK (of course you'd know that). You can post here, or send me further information via support@sonnysoftware.com.

Thanks for these suggestions.

Jon
Sonny Software

[nh220]

I'll post it here in case other people find it helpful. I am only posting Treaty as my set-up for Case is a bit of a mess (I actually have multiple Case types for different jurisdictions in different African countries, most of which would probably be of no interest to many Bookends users). And, yeah, legal citations are a mess (Bluebook, OSCOLA, whatever) and I do not think that there are any reference management programs that handle this reasonably well. I think Bookends is closest because of its flexibility. Also, when I write scholarly pieces I usually use Chicago (Author-Date) and, as CMOS instructs, use a heavily customized version of this Bookends style to output treaties and cases in Bluebook format and everything else in Chicago (A-D). I am also including how I set this up below. It is not perfect, but it works fine enough. And of course, as you note, you can just keep legal reference data in Bookends and ignore the scan/cite function (since they don't need to be included in a bibliography you can just cut and paste them into a Word doc as footnotes.

Anyway, this is my set-up:

Type: Multilateral Treaty

note: I almost never cite bilateral treaties, which is why this is specific to multilateral treaties. You could have a general Treaty which would require some modest edits to the below

Labels (using Journal Article as the reference):

Authors ---> Org (I don't actually use this field for output, but I included to easily sort by, e.g., United Nations, European Union, etc.
Title ---> Name of agreement (e.g., Convention Against Torture)
Journal ---> Treaty Source 1 (e.g., United National Treaty Collection or similar)
Vol (Issue) ---> Entry into Force
Date ---> Year Signed
Publisher ---> Treaty Source 2
User 1 ---> Date Signed

In the Format Manager, I have the following: t, u1, d, u, f. (this is for both Bibliography Options and Citation Options tabs).

This yields the following output by way of illustration:

Protocol Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components and Ammunition, Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, May 31, 2002, 2326 U.N.T.C. 208.

As a citation, it will include the () so requires manual edit if you also want to exclude the reference from the bibliography. (Unless you use Mellel).

[Jon]

Thank you very much. And forgive me after you've taken the time to explain this, but I do wonder if this is of enough general interest to add to the default Types. Multilateral Treaty is certainly not a common scholarly reference.

You've already created yours. If anyone else is interested in a Treaty Type, please chime in.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Dellu]

Conference Paper is known as inproceedings in the bibtex terms.

Screen Shot 2022-06-29 at 1.32.45 PM.png (27.26 KiB) Viewed 1394 times

Another popular type is the "incollection" which very similar to inproceedings, still differs from it because it uses "book title" in place of "conference" or "proceeding". You might consider adding "incollection" as well once you are there.

[Jon]

We wouldn't add BibTeX-style Types, they would be English nouns (e.g In Collection). Frankly, I don't know what "articles in a collection" means, or how the fields would differ from Journal Article.

Jon
Sonny Software