NRC Research Press Translator

DWL-SDCA

Author initials are not separated with a space. It seems that most of the other translators I use insert the a space between the initials.

( Obama, B. H. vs. Obama, B.H. )

The Canadian publisher not the US National Research Council.

Thanks

aurimas

Could you link to a specific page?

We're not very consistent with author name formatting in this regard. More often than not, we just pass along whatever format is presented on the page and that can vary a lot.

I think we may want to consider performing some general cleanup for author names just like we do for isbn. We would do this only for web/search translators and only for individual authors (not institutional authors). This way we should be able to apply correct formatting 99.99% of the time, which, I think, is pretty good for web import.

The cleanup I have in mind would be adding periods for initials, splitting up initials with spaces, convering authors in all-caps, converting to institutional author where we only import first or last name, removing things like "Ph.D." or "(1961-)".

I'm actually not sure how common these issues are, but I know that we have to deal with them in various translators. I doubt that we do an excellent job in all cases though.

Dan, would it be possible to get a dump of, say, 1,000,000 authors from synced public libraries to do some analysis of what needs improving and what we could actually improve?

DWL-SDCA

I wish I had asked this a week ago. I then went through several hundred records with name problems and applied fixes. I had several examples of each of the problems mentioned in your 3rd paragraph. My workflow will bring a hundred more in a few weeks. I can share the examples via support@zotero if that would be useful.

Examples of initials spacing issue from NRC Press:

10.1139/cjfr-2014-0469
10.1139/cjce-2013-0587
10.1139/cgj-2012-0468
10.1139/cgj-2012-0452

Soon I will provide examples of:

Jr. / Sr. without periods and placed after the first name with and without a separation comma; and the same situation where the suffix is in the lastname field

I'll provide a list of educational / credential status indicators. There are many, many more than PhD.

Also common are honorifics, government titles, military rank, and judicial / law titles.

DWL-SDCA

Another example (from ScienceDirect, this time) of Zotero's import of metadata where author initials are not separated by periods or spaces:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154614000230 and
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154614000254

but this article's author metadata from the same journal issue is correct:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154614000266

If you folks can make this work -- consistency in presentation of initials -- I will be very happy.

edit: added two more examples.

DWL-SDCA

Here is another problem (again, ScienceDirect):

10.1016/j.cobeha.2015.02.009

The metadata supplied by Elsevier to CrossRef and made available via BibTeX and RIS has the lead author's family name as "Read Montague" and his given name as "P". The printed article doesn't give a clue as to where first names and last name should break. I know the author's other work. His true given name is "P. Read" and his family name is Montague. Yet, the databases that index this article repeat the Elsevier error. Somehow, PubMed, if there is a search on "Read Montague P", will include the "Montegue PR" records.

I apologize if I have become tedious.

aurimas

The examples are great, so feel free to continue. Something like the last example, however, is a bit beyond what we can reasonably fix. At least I don't have plans to address that issue in the near future.