Incorrect entries from RIS exported by bvsalud.org

leonardof
Visit http://bvsalud.org (English, Spanish and Portuguese languages available), search something, and click the export icon, choose RIS, and open that file with Zotero.

The entries will have at least 2 issues:
1. If the data come from Pubmed, instead of LILACS, author names will be in a single field, with last name and initials, like "Souza MA", instead of "Souza"/"MA".
2. Year is something like "2010/12PY - 2010" instead of "2010" or "2010-12".

Could anyone please check for me if BVS is really exporting wrong RIS, or else if it's Zotero which isn't importing it correctly?

Thanks!
  • aurimas
    I'm having difficulty exporting RIS from BVS, but it does look like the issue is on their end. If you want, you can post the contents of the RIS file on http://gist.github.com and link to it here. We'll be able to tell you then.
  • adamsmith
    yup, it's a problem in the export data:
    https://gist.github.com/adam3smith/4a161f7b5b6a5b3d6363
    There is no explanation and no excuse for the date issue.
    The names issue might be due to where they get their data from, but I though they could just grab it from NCBI Pubmed, in which case, again, there's no excuse for these mangled names. We do see the same in some MEDLINE databases like, I believe, Ovid, though.
  • leonardof
    Thanks. I'll notify BVS.
  • aurimas
    They might be getting their data straight from MEDLINE (from what I saw, every item had a MEDLINE ID), in which case, you may have to bug MEDLINE about this.
  • leonardof
    I agree MEDLINE might be exporting wrong data. I sent an email to BVS explaining the situation, and made it clear I'm not sure why the author names are wrong.

    (I googled for the RIS specs, and the AU field should be "Surname, Name, Suffix", not "Surname Name".)
  • aurimas
    (I googled for the RIS specs, and the AU field should be "Surname, Name, Suffix", not "Surname Name".)
    correct
  • aurimas
    edited May 30, 2014
    So generally speaking, we could write a dedicated translator that would fix these errors for BVS on import (it would also provide the URL bar icon). However, my experience with BVS so far is that the website is quite slow, and, at least for me, the RIS export was timing out. This would frustrate the user and push blame onto Zotero. I'll try again tonight though. Maybe it was just intermittent

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