Upgrade StorageApparent Change in Style Processor
A change has apparently been made in the style processor. I think it used to substitute container-title if the style accessed container-title-short and no value existed. Now it doesn't.
After updating a reference list there were dozens of entries with no journal name. We had to go into each entry in Zotero and make entries in the Journal Abbr field. Can this be changed back to the way it was before?
After updating a reference list there were dozens of entries with no journal name. We had to go into each entry in Zotero and make entries in the Journal Abbr field. Can this be changed back to the way it was before?
Am I crazy? When you specify container-title-short and there's nothing in that field, isn't it supposed to then use container-title? Does the style processor in ZS work differently than ZFF? Has this feature changed in the style processor?
Anyway, they worked before. Now I had 2-3 dozen entries without journal names in the reference list.
You can still get the substitute behavior by using
<text variable="container-title" form="short"/>
which is what all the "official" citation styles use.
edit: FWIW behavior for title-short is the same.
edit2: this also seems to be in line with the specs. The substitute behavior is described for form="short", not mentioned for (container-)title-short
Thanks.
We need a way to keep our citation/reference styles stable. We can do that by rolling our own, but that doesn't insulate us from changes in how they are processed.
(I know the above sounds selfish, but I've never wanted to upload updates to styles because a change that's good for us might be bad for someone else.)
but updates that just fix mistakes as this one did won't be discussed on the list. The only other place to look would be the citeproc commit log:
https://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js/commits/all
(it's also possible that this behavior was introduced by a change in how the Zotero world plugin handles abbreviated journal titles. In that case it wouldn't have been clearly visible anywhere).
Zotero produced this entry for the reference: "Value Heal J Int Soc Pharmacoeconomics Outcomes Res". This is NOT the National Library of Medicine abbreviation for this journal. "Value Health" is the abbreviation.
Where is the abbreviation coming from? The style uses this code:<text variable="container-title" form="short"/>
THIS MAKES ZOTERO UNUSABLE FOR MEDICAL JOURNAL MANUSCRIPTS.
Medical journal submissions MUST conform to NLM journal abbreviations.
Changing functionality without notifying users is a sure way to move them to Endnote or some other platform.
Please
1) set the default for the journal name abbreviation checkbox on the Word plugin to be unchecked
2) email all users when you make a change in functionality
Automatic journal name abbreviations are disabled by default for existing documents. Zotero uses the setting you most recently selected as the default for new documents.
Nothing about this behavior has changed since the release of Zotero 4.0. We aren't going to email all of our users every time we update Zotero, but all changes are documented in the changelog, which we update before every Zotero release.
Zotero's automatic title abbreviation should be better documented, though.
I appreciate that Zotero is free and, especially considering that, it is well supported. However, documentation has always been a shortcoming and with an ongoing stream of feature changes there should be a proactive stance in making users aware of new features. (I'm not talking about bug fixes.)
Unfortunately, FireFox seems to have a security update every month. So most of us automatically accept updates to FireFox and most of us have it automatically update plugins. I work with Zotero every day and I wasn't aware of most of what's in the change log. Changes big and small are buried in it. I think it would be to your benefit and to the benefit of your users if you would document the program better and inform users of significant changes to Zotero. One way of doing so would be by periodically emailing your users and telling them about the latest features.
You've built a fine piece of software and we would all be better off if we knew more about it.
Best regards,
Ron Wielage
1. Your situation/position in this is more unusual than you seem to think it is. We do get questions/concerns from users when features like this change, but I can not remember any other case where users where so exasperated about a change that is easily reverted/addressed by changing a preference. The usual response to this is "oh, cool, ok". I understand that your needs may be different from other users' and that's fine, of course, but given those, I really do not see or envision any alternative to closely following the Zotero and citeproc changelogs, which we point you to above. Especially the Zotero changelogs are non-technical in language and if you don't understand a described change you can ask here.
2. That said, I don't think Zotero does a great - or even decent - job of announcing new features (though journal abbreviations - with a screenshot of this specific preference - were, in fact, covered in the 4.0 announcement on the blog): http://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-4-0-launches/
Partly because of that I started http://zoteromusings.wordpress.com/ on which I do plan to cover anything major that happens (though I certainly won't mention minor changes in citeproc behavior, so you'll still be stuck with checking changelogs). See e.g. my posts on the 4.0 release http://zoteromusings.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/whats-new-in-zotero-part-1/ http://zoteromusings.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/whats-new-in-zotero-4-0-part-2/
for an example. Obviously that's an unofficial blog, no guarantees etc. but you may find it useful. (While I do wish the official blog were more active, I don't think Zotero should send out hundreds of thousands of e-mails on every update).