Quote from Donna Cox Baker on February 1, 2024, 11:38 pm

There's a slightly obscure trick for citing a book review in Zotero. I'm not sure how this looks in styles other than the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), but here goes.

CMOS uses these examples for how it wants book review citations to come out:

Footnote

1. Ben Ratliff, review of The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil, by Hermano Vianna, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen, Lingua Franca 9 (April 1999): B13–B14.

Bibliography

Brehm, William C. Review of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers against Austerity, by Micah Uetricht. Comparative Education Review 59, no. 1 (February 2015): 177–79. https://doi-org.libdata.lib.ua.edu/10.1086/679296.

Here's the trick in Zotero, assuming it's a standard book review in a journal:

1. Choose the Journal Article item type.
2. In the Title field, put the name of the book being reviewed.
3. Put two creators. The Author is the person doing the book review. The Reviewed Author is the author of the book being reviewed.
4. Fill in the rest of the details about where and when the review (not the book) was published.

The Reviewed Author field tells Zotero to handle this differently than a normal journal article.

CMOS gives us something tricker in the case where the reviewer has put their own title on the review in a newspaper, like this:

2. David Kamp, “Deconstructing Dinner,” review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, New York Times, April 23, 2006, Sunday Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/books/review/23kamp.html.

In this case, you can't get it to perfectly render the citation. I came as close as I could (and left a note to myself to do cleanup before publishing a citation based on this) by doing these steps:

1. In the Newspaper's Title field, I used a bit of HTML to italicize the book name within this larger piece of text:
   "Deconstructing Dinner," review of <i>The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals</i>, by Michael Pollan
2. I did not use a Reviewed Author, but made the rest of the information match the news information. I added a cautionary note in brackets and all caps in the Section field, after "Sunday Book Review." The total Section field reads:
   Sunday Book Review [REMOVE QUOTATIONS AND LOWERCASE “REVEW”]

The finished footnote looks like this:

David Kamp, “‘Deconstructing Dinner,’ Review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan,” New York Times, April 23, 2006, Sunday Book Review [REMOVE QUOTATIONS AND LOWERCASE “REVIEW”], http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/books/review/23kamp.html.

It's close to what's needed, but will need work done to get the quotation marks corrected. And the word "Review" is to be lowercased. And of course, you'll want to pull out the cautionary note.