Cited date not showing in Chest bibliography, NLM, others

konieca

When hovering over citation styles, such as Chest, NLM, various other biomedical, the style displayed for a journal article indicates that it will have the needed [cited 2011 Feb 15]. However, the date accessed is not being pulled into the bibliography in Word. This was true of multiple styles within the biomedical field. If this is standard in the bibliography, why is the date cited not displaying? My citations were drawn in from PubMed, so it's not an error with retrieving date accessed info.

Thanks in advance for any help.

adamsmith

Could you provide an example?
Generally, NLM style should only provide a "cited" date for online-only sources. Most articles from PubMed have a print version and should not be cited as [online], nor with a "cited by" date.

If you really do want URLs and cited dates for regular journal articles (knowing that this will be incorrect according to NLM guidelines) you can check the "include URLs" box in the cite/styles tab of the Zotero preferences.

konieca

Thanks for your thoughts on this issue, and sorry for the delay in responding. Perhaps I was misunderstanding the NLM guidelines for citing journal articles. Are you indicating that this section of Citing Medicine refers specifically to online only journals, rather than journal articles that were retrieved online but have a print counterpart: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7281/#A55587

The vast majority of our journals are online, but also have a print counterpart, so does that mean that they are cited as print journals, as shown in this section of Citing Medicine:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7282/#A32362

Thanks for the clarification.

adamsmith

I think at this point it's a matter of taste - you're right that the NLM instructions read like you should include URL etc. for all articles that you saw online, even when a print counterpart exists - i.e., I assume, pretty much all articles (how many people still get their articles from the print version of journal?).

But if you look at any given journal that follows NLM instructions, you'll _never_ see this in practice (trust me - I have coded a lot of the medical styles on the repository). And I doubt that's because all medical researchers keep a huge pile of paper journals in their office.

If you want to follow the NLMs rules as they're stated, check the URL box as I say above and Zotero will do that - but for almost all actual use cases that will just look wrong.

konieca

Thanks,

Next question - I see multiple references within the Zotero forum indicating that Vancouver and NLM style are very similar. However, looking at the Introduction for Citing Medicine, nowhere is Vancouver style mentioned as a reference, and in fact, for the in-text references, Scientific Style and Format (7th ed. Reston (VA): Council of Science Editors; 2006) is the recommended source for the citation-sequence, citation-name, and name-year systems for in-text referencing: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7265/

I currently have the book Scientific Style and Format sitting on my desk. On p. 492 it specifically indicates "If possible, place the numbers in superscript at each point of citation to eliminate confusion between in-text references and parenthetic numbers."

With the above being the case, why does the word processor plug in place the in-text references as numbers in parentheses rather than having them superscripted for NLM style?

Thanks in advance for your insight.

adamsmith

Vancouver is a different and commonly used name for the NLM style - if you google Vancouver style one of the first links gets you here:
http://www.icmje.org/ (which in turn direct to Citing Medicine).

If you want superscript, use Vancouver superscript, the styles are otherwise equivalent.

CSE is a separate citation style (supported by Zotero). Citing medicine merely links to the CSE book for a discussion of the three main systems of citation, not to endorse the specifics of how those are implemented. It's easy to ascertain that all three forms - parentheses, square brackets, and superscripts - are common in medicine.

What do you need all this for, btw.? For journals you make sure the style corresponds to published articles, grants typically either don't care or have clearly outlined requirements. You take the style that fits those.

konieca

Writing a paper using NLM citation style rather than using a particular journal's style that is based largely on NLM.

adamsmith

Pick what you like best then - NLM style, if you look at it closely, leaves a fair amount of discretion to publishers (and I gather the publisher is you in this case). I personally think superscripts are the nicest form of numeric citations, so I'd go with that, too.