Cita doesn't support proceedings

[Futur3r]

Describe the bug
When synchronizing the references of an item, cita doesn't sync proceedings and shows an error

To Reproduce
Sync the citations of an item that cites proceedings, for example "Géographie, anthropologie et anarchie au XIXe siècle"

Expected behavior
Sure, there is no "proceedings" type in Zotero, but the reference could be sync with the "book" type and a tag in it's extra fields like "Type: proceedings" ?

Environment:

• Zotero version: 6.0.13
• Cita version: 0.5.3-beta
• OS name and version: Gentoo linux

[diegodlh]

Hi, @Futur3r! Thanks for your report.

Zotero doesn't have a "proceedings" item type, but does have a "conference paper" item type, which maps to Wikidata's "conference paper" (Q23927052), defined as "document published as part of the proceedings of an academic conference".

From this, it looks like a "proceedings" would be a collection of "conference papers". And it would make sense that a work cites a conference paper in a proceedings, instead of the entire proceedings.

Does this make sense? Shouldn't these cites work targets in Wikidata you mention (such as Q115703103) be changed to instances of "conference paper" instead?

[Futur3r]

Yes, it should, but the author cited the proceedings and not a single conference paper in these proceedings.
I'm just extracting data from the "references" section of the paper. Same for a book, an author can cite an entire book without having to cite a specific book section. It's almost impossible for me to know which specific paper an author cites, the only person who knows this is the author him⋅herself.

And it's not the only one, I found that kind of citations sometimes and it's trickier when there is no Open Access version of the papers.

So we could adapt Cita to the nature of the data ?
The zotero item "Proceedings" will probably never exist, but as Cita works with citations it must adapt to some other types of elements.

[diegodlh]

Sorry for my delayed replies.

Because of how Cita works (how the citation lists are saved, how cited items can be linked to items in the Zotero library, etc), I would not support cited item types which are not item types in Zotero.

However, I don't mean we should continue ignoring cited items of types not supported. Instead, we may use a higher class which includes the type not supported. For example, for the "proceedings" case, we may use the generic "document" type. Issue #93 is closely related to this.

So, if in Wikidata it says an item cites another of type "proceedings", Cita would import it as a citation of type "document". The other way round, if one adds a citation in Cita of type "document", it may be uploaded to Wikidata as a "cites work" statement to an element of type "work", and the user may then further refine this in Wikidata.

[Futur3r]

Yes, having a default item type is better. I think Zotero use also the 'document' type as a default sometimes.
It will be easier to code, as a simple 'else' statement.