Series and series number fields for working papers

I often need to cite working papers and discussion papers (such as those from the National Bureau of Economic Research, http://nber.org/new.html ). It’s normal practice to include the working paper series name and number when citing these.

In Paperpile I have been categorising working papers as “preprint manuscripts”, but the “series” and “series number” fields are not available for this record type. Is it possible to make these two fields available for preprint manuscripts? Or, alternatively, do you recommend categorising working papers in some other way?

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Agreed. This applies to most working papers series in Economics, at least. On a related note, I really wish Paperpile could automatically recognise working papers (e.g. from SSRN) as preprints, so that they aren’t marked as ‘Incomplete’.

Thanks we will have a look at it. It should be trivial to activate the series name and series number fields. The question is if CSL (the citation style language language processor we are using), correctly interprets these fields in combination with the style you are using. Is there any common style in your field which would be most important to test with?

Hi Stefan, thanks for following up on this (especially on a sunny Sunday afternoon). The style I’m using seems to be only a slight modification of Harvard reference format 1, so for me that’s the key one to try this with.

I’ve just noticed that the series and number fields now appear for preprint manuscripts. Thanks very much for adding that.

So yes, the next question is how to make that information appear in bibliographies. I have defined my own custom style (to match my university’s requirements), so I should in principle be able to edit my .csl file to add the series and number details when appropriate. However, looking at the list of variables in the citationstyles.org editor, it’s not obvious to me what the variable names are that correspond to the series and number fields in Paperpile. Please could you clarify?

The Paperpile “series” field is mapped to “collection-title”, while the field “number” is mapped to “number”.

Excellent. I have this working just as I wanted now. Thanks!

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