Upgrade Storage"Clean" and fill references before creating bibliography?
Hello all,
considering references come from all sort of subscribtion-based providers, depending on you librarian's taste, most often fields are not filled in the same way. For example, you could get an all caps title, only one cap at the beginning, or a cap on each word. Some publishers abbreviate journal's names, and some other don't. Some abbreviate ppage numbers (e.g. 128-43), yet others don't (128-142). Dates may be provided in digits, letters, both, in many different orders.
Considering all this mess, is there a way to 1- complete the missing fields, if they exist? And 2- Clean up the resulting list of references to get a uniform presentation once inserted?
Thanks,
considering references come from all sort of subscribtion-based providers, depending on you librarian's taste, most often fields are not filled in the same way. For example, you could get an all caps title, only one cap at the beginning, or a cap on each word. Some publishers abbreviate journal's names, and some other don't. Some abbreviate ppage numbers (e.g. 128-43), yet others don't (128-142). Dates may be provided in digits, letters, both, in many different orders.
Considering all this mess, is there a way to 1- complete the missing fields, if they exist? And 2- Clean up the resulting list of references to get a uniform presentation once inserted?
Thanks,
The ideal format is to have
- Full first names of authors
- Titles in sentencecase
- Page numbers in full
- Journals both with their full title (under journal title) and abbreviation (under journal abbr., ideally including periods)
- date in any format that Zotero recognizes (which includes most common formats) - it will display y m d next to the date.
With this in place, Zotero is able to create pretty much any citation output correctly.
There is no automated way of fixing or completing the data. While some improvements are likely possible (e.g. completing data using DOIs, allowing batch editing), fixing this up is and will remain to some degree a manual task. The best you can do to minimize the amount of manual labor necessary is to import data from databases with high-quality metadata (Library of Congress, JSTOR, many journal publishers).
Just in case one could come accross multiple databases would it be possible to merge all results?
There's that nifty function in Mendeley where you could click on "Search by title" that allows you to fill in the missing information. Why not in Zotero?
Aren't reference manager softwares designed to help you gain time instead of wasting it?
If you find missing fields in imports from a database, do feel free to report it and we'll be happy to take a look and see if import can be improved. in the 3.0 version - yes. Mainly because it hasn't been implemented. But also, you would again get inconsistent data: Mendeley searches other people's databases as well as google scholar for the title. For the former, data quality is inconsistent. For the latter, it's not great: You will only ever get author initials, and commonly miss fields like journal abbr. and DOI.
As a general workflow issue, you will need to check and fix up citations as they come in to prevent having to do it all at the last minute when you're inserting the bibliography. That's no less the case with Mendeley.
I see the issue about looking through other people's bases. Still, when I only got the title of a paper article, Google Scholar is invaluable in finding the publication it came from, as well as the providers.
Considering it works just OK in Mendeley, Zotero could use a better "footprint" system, a bit like MP3-taggers, as MusicBrainz does to get a "relevancy" rate about a song; same would go for a scientific article.
An example: DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.04.030.
As inserted by DOI, no abstract is inserted, date is incorrect (only year is mandated in science articles), language is not inserted (although most of them are in English, I found a few in Italian, Spanish, Russian or Portuguese), no journal title abbreviation.
Another example: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?volume=162&page=1125
No DOI, no abstract, no date, no title, no journal abreviation.
Yet another example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6T0J-3V51F1N-B/2/b0bd0cf027fa150448608c7291a54f42
What journal, author's names and paper title are doing in the "Abstract" section?
I have many other examples of incorrectly filled fields, and while it may be feasible to fill in a few missing fields, virtually ALL references have "holes" in them. If merging records is in the works, when will Zotero for Firefox include it? I'm not talking about the standalone Zotero version since it doesn't take SSL (suggested workaround shown in the dialog box doesn't work).
You can see the translator when you hover your mouse over the URL bar icon - this is not a supported database, so it just imports via DOI. That should give you a title, a DOI, and a date, though (it does for me). If that's not the case, something is wrong:
http://www.zotero.org/support/troubleshooting_translator_issues well, check the site - they are in the abstract field. Again, though, I fail to see how that matters for citations. Abstracts are not part of any standard citation style. again, it's in the current beta version for both Standalone and Firefox.
Back to articles talk.
Actually my musical taste is very varied, but I appreciate, when a CD was edited, ripped and tagged, when MB suggests a tag that may match its content. It's not always right, but often enough to be useful, for ordering, not a definite as you wrote. I felt Zotero could do better than Mendeley since being open-source usually brings many more developers than closed-source models.
Granted, abstract and languages are not used for citation purpose, but I though it would be useful to ease the indexing process, especially when it comes to pre-1995 papers, which are often only available on paper, need to be OCR-ed, an error-prone process.
Dates can be problematic since I would like them to automatically adjust according to column's width. At least, it would be useful they get an uniform presentation, e.g. no 01/2006 with 2006-02-04. I never had a use for timelines, at least they're not used in science projects, so cannot say a word on them.
About AJP, I just noticed the "Import in Zotero (DOI)" info. I never paid any attention to this small notice until now. I still feel that Zotero could use an automated process to look for other databases listing the article, and fill in missing info. While MB databases are user-edited, academic databases are, hopefully, more tightly managed. Since it can be long or require great CPU power to do so, why not place an option to do it in the background while computer is plugged in?
If records merging is available, where is the command in standalone Zotero?
I agree on the uniform presentation of dates in the middle column.
On the rest, I think you mainly have a naive view on both the legal and technical feasibility, though as I say in the beginning, some functionality to complete records is both desirable and relatively likely to come at some point in the future.
Until then - find out which databases provide good data, use those.
I do believe that practicality takes precedence over other concerns in this context. It's not clear how "legality" would be implied here, although I quite understand what "technicality" would imply here. That's why scientists do science, and coders code :)
1. Using users' data, even if anonymized, to compete information would likely require specific user consent. With Mendeley you sign industry-standard EULAs when you use the software, essentially signing over everything but your soul. With Zotero you don't.
2. Automatically crawling and scraping proprietary databases is almost certainly illegal and against their respective terms of use.
Technical issues are, of course, very practical.
For Journal Abbreviations, specifically, we'll soon have a more sophisticated solution
http://citationstylist.org/tools/?#abbreviations-gadget-entry
you may want to read some bios...