Popup Wording Suggestion

[Danny Weltman]

Sometimes when I add a new book chapter and autofill details from a DOI it asks me if I want to "Recursively update ISBN(s) for contained/container works?" and sometimes I click yes and sometimes I click no because:

1) I don't care about ISBNs either way and
2) I have no clue what it is asking me about

My best guess is that it's asking if it wants me to change the larger work's ISBN to whatever just got automatically entered as the ISBN of the chapter. If that's what it's saying then maybe it should say something like "Change ISBN(s) for the following works to match this work's ISBN(s)?" and then list the works it's going to change.

[Jason Winning]

Your best guess is pretty close: It will change larger works and child works to have the same ISBN.

The reason to care about ISBNs is that it is one of the things Hypernomicon (and probably Zotero) uses to auto-fill bibliographic information from the internet. It is the most universal way of identifying a specific edition of a book for purposes of finding that edition in a library, on Google Books, Amazon, other online book stores, etc. There have been times that I've only been able to find the exact book edition I wanted on Amazon, for example, by entering the ISBN, and I think I've need to do that to find certain rare library books (for example, if there is another very popular book that has the same title, and the first 100 search results are just various editions of that other book, a situation I've encountered a number of times).

An example situation where you would want to click "No" is if there is an article contained in a book, and you want to keep track of that fact, but when you want to cite the article, you want to cite it as originally published in a journal.

For example, Davidson's article "Causal Relations" was published in Journal of Philosophy as well as his popular 1980 book "Essays on Actions and Events". Sometimes people cite it in the book so in my database I have it as a child work of the book (then I can easily pull it up in the book PDF to see the page they are citing). But if I cite that paper, I want to cite it as a journal article and have it listed that way in the work record, with publication year 1967. Then I would not want to update that child work to have the ISBN of the book because auto-fill would give the wrong results.

Similarly, there might be a paper published in multiple books, so you might have a work listed with multiple parents. But when you cite it, you only want to cite as a chapter of one of those books. Then you wouldn't want it to have the other book's ISBN.

I like your suggestion for rewording the prompt so I will make an enhancement request for that.