Journal Name is Slightly Incorrect

I am trying to cite references from Biochemistry and the journal name has (Mosc.) after it. I'm assuming Zotero thinks this is the Biochemistry published in Moscow when it should be the ACS publication. The ISSN is correct in the metadata, and I have "Biochemistry" in the journal abbreviation field.

An example of the incorrect citation:
Drew, D., Shimada, E., Huynh, K., Bergqvist, S., Talwar, R., Karin, M., and Ghosh, G. (2007) Inhibitor κB Kinase β Binding by Inhibitor κB Kinase γ, Biochemistry (Mosc.) 46, 12482–12490.
  • confirmed, that'll need to get fixed in the abbreviations list.
    I don't have a quick fix for you, but we should be able to get this fixed for the next Zotero version.
    (@aurimas - or do you happen to know whether your last fix already covers this?)
  • edited October 1, 2013
    Unfortunately, Zotero currently ignores Journal Abbreviation field if you have automatic abbreviations turned on. You can turn these off in word: open Zotero preferences in Word [gear icon] and uncheck "Autimatically abbreviate journal titles". In this case, none of the journal titles will be automatically abbreviated and Zotero will rely entirely on what's entered in the Journal Abbreviation field. Alternatively, you can just make a final edit to the abbreviation in the bibliography when you're done with your manuscript.

    We'll have to think about how to fix this for a future Zotero version, since other journals could be affected as well and there is _a lot_ of abbreviation data to look through.

    Edit: @adamsmith, the last fix does not cover this. That abbreviation ("Biochemistry" = "Biochemistry (Mosc.)" appears to come straight from MEDLINE)

    Edit 2: I'm actually still not clear where these abbreviations are pulled from. Simon, is the script available somewhere?
  • edited October 2, 2013
    When there are 2 or more journals with the same name, at least one gets a suffix -- the original city of publication within curved brackets. This is the standard for disambiguation of journal names. IIRC this is the recommended disambiguation standard for the AngloAmerican Cataloging Rules, NLM, USLOC, British Library, and others
  • That's true, but the problem is that Zotero currently "doesn't know" which Biochemistry journal should get the city of publication and which one should not, since either could be entered as "Biochemistry" in the journal title field.

    One solution would be to expect Biochemistry from Moscow to have the full title entered as "Biochemistry (Moscow)", but that would require us to edit the (presumably) automatically generated list of abbreviations, which is not ideal.

    The other solution could be for us to first rely on ISSN numbers to assign abbreviations. I think that would be a pretty good solution, but it would substantially increase the abbreviation table, because we would still want to retain "Full title" -> "Abbreviated Title" mappings as a fallback where ISSN is not entered.
  • Any updates on this? I assume not because I am still having the exact same problem...
  • If the journal is indexed in MEDLINE and there are mulitple journals with the same name, the subsequent journal name(s) and abbreviation(s) will have the publication city appended to the journal's title and abbreviation. If the Zotero translator brings in the MEDLINE-supplied abbreviation, the metadata should include the abbreviation with the city where the journal was first published. There are a few exceptions to this rule. If a journal named A changes its name to B and after a few years changes its name back to A again, and the city of publication is unchanged; the second version of Journal A will be abbreviated the same as the first version with that title but the year publication of the second version in parens instead of the (unchanged) city of publication. Some other databases also do this -- especially those that license MEDLINE data. Some of these other databases will also retroactively change the name and abbreviation of the original journal A to include the year it was first published. Alas, some databases do not append the city or year to journal abbreviations with identical names.
  • remember, though, that importing the right abbreviation doesn't help us much -- the problem is the auto-generated list. We need a policy on fixing that, but we don't currently even know on how it's generated, which makes that tricky. Unfortunately Simon has never gotten back to either Aurimas or me on this.
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