Short titles for journals and series

iscott · January 24, 2008

I appreciate that you provide a field for a short title for journals. Would it be possible to automate this feature a bit, so that users could maintain one master list of abbreviations for journal titles and these would automatically be supplied in references as necessary? The same feature would be very helpful with book series titles. I need to have "Wissenschaftlich Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament" as the series title in the main Zotero entry, but it would be great if I could tell Zotero to shorten this to "WUNT" in citations.

scot · January 25, 2008

I second this, both the request for list-management of abbreviated journal titles, and the addition of an 'Abbreviated Series Title' field (with list-management there too). About every other scholarly book published in Biblical Studies and Ancient Near Eastern Studies are in a monograph series, and most of the citation styles used in these disciplines (at least in N. America, the UK and Germany ) require the series titles in the citation, sometimes full, sometimes abbreviated, depending on the application.

Do any other disciplines commonly use series names in citations, and abbreviate them much (but not all!) of the time?

There has been some discussion of the Journal abbreviation issue before, and I know that for some the holy grail is a web service, so that no one ever has to manage their own abbreviation lists again. But I think a local (non-web) solution is a good first step because it solves the following problems:

1) publishers who want to see a certain set of (common) series/journal names abbreviated, but expect that others will be written out in full

2) off-line use

3) the possibility of different abbreviations for the same item (I don't have a confirmed case of this, so I can't say whether it is a genuine problem).

4) it might be less work to impliment