In Mac Word 2011, journal titles are shown incorrectly in bibliography

onedayonenoodle
When Journal Abbr field is "J. Neurosci." and is supposed to be like "J Neurosci", it is shown as "J. Neurosci. Off. J. Soc. Neurosci." instead in my Word 2011 document.

Another example is "Mov. Disord. Off. J. Mov. Disord. Soc." where it should be "Mov. Disord." This happens whatever CSL style I choose.

I suspect that this is due to misinterpretation of CSL rather than CSL itself. It looks like Zotero is trying to generate journal title out of Publication field of an item, which is like "The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience" and "Movement disorders: official journal of the Movement Disorder Society" for the examples above. The CSL files had been OK for a long time. This might be related to the new version of Zotero or Word plugin.

Interestingly, when I drag an item to a document, the bibliographic information is organized correctly, like "J Neurosci". This suggests it's more related to the Word plugin.

I am using Version 4.0.27 on Mac OSX 10.10.4. I have reinstalled Word plugin, but did not help.

Can anyone provide a solution?
  • aurimas
    Disable automatic journal abbreviations in document preferences if you want Zotero to use the Journal Abbr field. https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/journal_abbreviations Otherwise, like you say, Zotero automatically abbreviates the value of the Publication field.
  • aurimas
    Or just fix the value of the Publication field
  • adamsmith
    @aurimas -- what do you think is the solution here? I see two options:
    1. We include the full journal titles in the abbreviation list
    2. We don't include journal subtitles from PubMed?

    Thoughts? Preferences?
  • aurimas
    2, I think. Those titles are never cited with subtitles are they? Do you think we're risking dropping parts of actual titles?
  • adamsmith
    I'm not worried about the subtitle, no. DWL may have advice on this, he knows PubMed best, I think (too bad we can't ping on the forum...)
  • onedayonenoodle
    Cheers. It worked. It was hard to find that option. Perhaps, by default it should be disabled?
  • adamsmith
    no, generally things work better with the option enabled -- many sites don't import journal abbreviations.
  • DWL-SDCA
    Getting into this a bit late...

    As a general rule, PubMed avoids journal subtitles in abbreviations. However, there are a few exceptions for when there are two or more journals with the same base name. Sometimes this is handled by abbreviating the base title and the subtitle. Other times the abbreviation follows the convention for multiple journals with the same title and with no subtitle. That is, the title is abbreviated normally but is followed by the original city of publication in parens ( curved brackets ). All of the same-name journals have this abbreviation pattern. Note that this means that when a new journal is indexed with the same name as an older one (whether or not the older one was discontinued before the start of the new same-name journal) the older journal's abbreviation will be updated to include the city. The formal, standardized journal titles will also be updated to include the city names.

    When I have some extra time, I'll comment on the times that the NLM and LITA ISO abbreviations do not agree.
  • aurimas
    IIRC the last time I looked into this, it seemed that it would be best to perform automatic journal abbreviations based on the ISSN for journals that share the same title and particularly for those journals that add the city of publication to the abbreviated title. Do we ever cite the subtitle in the un-abbreviated form?
  • DWL-SDCA
    Another source of abbreviations:

    There are quite a few medical and health-related journals that are no longer published that do not have abbreviations in current the U.S. National Library of Medicine listings. Although I frequently see cites to those journals (particularly concerning worker productivity and worker injuries) items from these journals are not typically included in PubMed or OLDMEDLINE. Some (many?) of these journal title abbreviations are not easily handled with the ISO-LTWA standards and rules. The source that I prefer is now available as a free download from Google Books:

    "Alphabetical List of Abbreviations of Titles of Medical Periodicals Employed in the Index-Catalog of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, United States Army"

    https://books.google.com/books/about/Alphabetical_list_of_abbreviations_of_ti.html?id=vJrVg_iJv1kC

    The id number (after the ?) is important as it will take you to the volume with cumulative listings through 1916.
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