Re: [Bibdesk-users] A Few Questions

[Maxwell, A. R <ada...@pn...>]

On 11/23/09 14:15, "Christiaan Hofman" <cmh...@gm...> wrote:

> 
> On Nov 23, 2009, at 22:21, Nick Illich wrote:
> 
>>>> About group fields, I went to View->Group Field->Add Field and tried to
>>>> type in "Series", but it gave me a warning that says "Invalid Field: The
>>>> field "Series" can not be used for groups."
>>  
>>>>  
>>> Fields containing some kind of title would be useless for field groups.
>>> There would just be one group for each item, because titles are generally
>>> unique, and they also do not consist of a list of unique words like
>>> Keywords.
>>> If you want to do some matching on a title-like field according to some
>>> matching criterium, you should use a smart group, as Adam suggested.

I actually linked directly to the field group help page, since I didn't
recall where the menu entry lived now :).

>> I'm sorry, I'm a little confused. Why would an entry like 'series' be useless
>> for a field group? For series, it's similar browsing articles in a journal,
>> which listed in the field groups already. Instead, it would be browsing books
>> in a series, right? Am I understanding it correctly?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Nick
>> 
> 
> I'd say that a series is much more like a booktitle. There are generally much
> more articles in a journal than there are books in a series. Therefore series
> are not good for grouping items, as there will be one or at most just a few
> per item.

Maybe this depends on your area of interest?  Grep says I only have two
series fields in my database (and they're  different), but most of my
references are journals.  However, I don't recall any technical reason why
series and booktitle aren't specified as single-valued fields; booktitle
actually seems like a good candidate for it, since I have a bunch of those
that are identical.