Wrong journal name for PNAS

In Zotero, the 'publication' term of PNAS is always 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' instead of 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'. This issue will result in errors when displaying Medline journal abbreviations.
  • I have 198 PNAS articles in my Zotero library all with the correct name that disagrees with that.

    What shows as the publication term in Zotero items is a function of where you saved the data from. All my entries are from PubMed, which has high-quality data. You can also save from the journals' webpages, which tend to have correct data, too. Or use the add by Identifier button.

    Any chance you save your papers from Google Scholar? They tend to have missing and incorrect data. If you get your Zotero items from Google Scholar (or other imperfect sources), you may need to correct them in your Zotero library.
  • I tried many ways to import, such as dragging PDF files into Zotero and using the connector to import from the PNAS website. In both cases, the publication item is 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences', which is wrong. Nevertheless, importing from PubMed gives the correct journal name.
  • I believe Zotero is simply respecting the data source here. PNAS, on its webpage, calls itself with the shorter form (without the USA). If you look at the Page Source of their paper pages, the metadata there is also the short form.

    If you enter the doi in the Add by Identifier button, the Journal Abbreviation does have U.S.A., but the longer form still doesn't. That's how they seem to have registered their papers.

    To fix, you can simply sort all papers in My Library by Publication, and quickly paste in the Publication field the version you want.
  • For this certain journal, of course, I can manually fix it every time, but are there any other journal name errors like this?
  • What we currently import e.g. from pnas.org comes directly from the journal (as does the DOI information, via CrossRef, used when getting metadata for PDFs).

    I think the right solution here might actually be to fix the abbreviation algorithm to abbreviate ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' as 'Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A' rather than changing the full journal name. I don't think I have ever seen PNAS cited as 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America' in journals that don't abbreviate journal titles.
  • For New Phytologist, PNAS appears in the reference list like this: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Please note, even if I change the journal name to 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America', Zotero still cannot handle it correctly for New Phytologist.
  • I suggest you complain to PNAS that they have their journal name wrong throughout their entire webpage and how they register it, if this is a problem for you. They may disagree.

    For a solution within Zotero, you can do the manual change, or maybe someone more knowledgeable can respond about how Medline abbreviations are implemented.

    But generally, you may want to be careful for where you collect bibliographic data: hence, my Pubmed suggestion. It is not that Pubmed has them necessarily more correct than the journal itself. It is, however, more uniform across all biomedical journals.
  • even if I change the journal name to 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America', Zotero still cannot handle it correctly for New Phytologist.
    Sure, but
    a) even conceptually, how would you think Zotero should handle that? It could (and maybe should) have a couple more abbreviation lists than Medline, but there's no way it could have journal-level differences for individual style guides like this and
    b) does anyeone actually care? I'd assume journals with strong views on this level of detail just handle it during copyedit, don't they? E.g. the New Phytologist explicitly recommends Zotero and we have never gotten a complaint from them.
  • Your PubMed suggestion is very welcome. However, on their home page, if you scroll down, you can certainly see the full name. Also, on Journal Citation Reports (aka SCI), it is correctly registered as the PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. So it is probably not a good idea to complain to PNAS.
  • I mean -- I just wouldn't worry about it that much, but as I say above, PNAS does provide its journal name as ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" whenever they provide citation metadata, i.e. both in the RIS (when you click the "Cite" button, and in the metadata they deposit with CrossRef, which are the two places from which Zotero picks it up. Otoh, Pubmed and SCI compile their own metadata.
  • I agree that it is not a problem for a single journal. As a new Zotero user recently switching from Endnote, I am a bit concerned that there are other journal name errors like this. If that is the case, I guess I have to be careful every time I import a paper to Zotero, because in my experience, some reviewers considered errors in the reference list as one reason to reject one manuscript. In any case, Zotero is much better than Endnote in this regard.
  • edited January 10, 2023
    Welcome to Zotero!

    This is the first line on PNAS' Author's page: "Submit to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and have your research discovered by millions of researchers in the Biological, Physical, and Social Sciences." Clearly they do not care, as they don't even put it in the metadata they serve on their webpage.

    I agree that paying attention to the quality of the data one has in their library is a good thing, and I do modify a thing here and there. But as someone who has published for 20+ years (incl. four in PNAS) and also an editor, I am certain no sane reviewer or editor would or should care about this.

    Journal abbreviations is an issue that gets discussed regularly here. More important are probably updates to data, as journals update volume/issue numbers or add DOIs after the electronic versions come out. Or when PMID and PMCIDs are assigned, which you may need for grant applications. I would pay more attention to those issues in your library as you publish. (I think Zotero devs are working to implement an automated data update mechanism, but no ETAs.)
  • Thanks enozkan! Don't get me wrong. I in fact really like Zotero, and I just hope it can be even better (of course, I understand that nothing is perfect). Yes, I also noticed the missing update function.
  • edited January 10, 2023
    even if I change the journal name to 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America', Zotero still cannot handle it correctly for New Phytologist.
    For this, did you try hitting the Refresh button in the Zotero plugin within Word after changing the Publication name? (And is "Use MEDLINE journal abbreviations" checked in your Document Preferences in the Word plugin?)
Sign In or Register to comment.