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Chicago Manual of Style 17th ed. vs. Turabian 8th ed. (both full note)
Donna;
I've played around with Zotero and the export of a CMS-style citation vs. a Turabian-style citation as a starting point for crafting an EE-Style citation. Neither gives me everything I need, but Turabian seems to export some info (such as access dates for online newspaper archives) that I need and that the CMS export misses. Have you tried Turabian? Perhaps there are issues I have yet to see?
I must admit that I wish I could get a reliable way to export the "Extra" field content as discursive notes (tacked on the end of the CMS citation.) That would REALLY help by allowing me to capture and export the remaining layer data for an EE-style citation.
The Extra field has been tailored to do some things Zotero's regular item types don't. You can see some of them here:
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/item_types_and_fields#citeable_item_types_not_included_in_zotero
At this point, I don't see that they've created a variable that would put the entire or partial contents of Extra at the end of the citation, though that seems like a very reasonable thing to ask, and I will see if it can be included in future versions.
I tried using the "Status" variable and thought for a moment it would work for getting a note to be included in the citation. But it is programmed to show only in certain conditions. For example, if you do a book Item Type and include a publication date, the Status field will not show up in the citation. It expects you to put something like "pending publication" or something else which will take the place of the publication date.
I will ask if they can offer a way to create a note that will be appended to the end of a citation.
By the way, I've been told that the access date for web material is tending to be phased out of many styles, since it's rare that anyone can pinpoint exactly what a page looked like on any given day, unless it happens to be the day that the Wayback Machine snapped an image. It becomes something of an honor system that can't be verified, unless the researcher saved and can produce a copy. It's no longer a part of the CMOS style. Turabian tends to follow CMOS, so it might disappear from there, too. I don't know if EE will phase it out eventually.
Thanks for your reply, Donna.
Oddly; Turabian includes the access date for newspapers, while CMOS does not. Personally; I agree that access dates for web-resources don't add a great deal, but I use them because they are still in the EE-style. In fact; the whole issue of layering is really only necessary when a referenced work is unpublished and therefore only found in one location. There are arguments for keeping the layers in all cases, but they seem to be based on "fear" that one electronic source is "better" quality than another. I'm not sure that is enough of a reason.
My frustration level with EE-style citations is rather high today. I find that I spend more time hand-crafting citations because there is no way to auto-generate something even close to an EE-style citation. Even the techniques in the Zotero book really only get you the first layer. That means that I need to reallocate a fair amount of my finite "genealogy" time from researching, filing and analyzing to augmenting the generated citations. I believe that EE-style layers need to move in the direction of something that developers can reflect as a somewhat "standard" structure. That is; a structure that can be coded in an application.
I sure hope that the Zotero team can do something to allow discursive notes because then we could at least get the info for the remaining levels of an EE-citation to come across. Think of it as being a special case of a discursive note, a capability which is valuable in itself.
