Zotero is stuck when handling very many author names

GregorHerten

When importing a DOI of a paper with very many author names, then standalone Zotero is stuck and does not respond any more.

Example DOI 10.1007/JHEP11(2013)183

There should be an option to limit the number of imported authors, e.g. to 20.

I use Zotero 4.0.26.1 on the Mac

aurimas

For reference, that's 2918 authors http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP11(2013)183

Not that this will help with your current issue, but you should update Zotero.

How long have you let it run for? If you give it enough time, it should eventually succeed in importing that article.

We'll see what we can do to speed things up in the future. It would be a shame to drop authors, but that many authors is not going to be feasible to keep. We could probably drop authors from the middle (at least not the very last author, since that is sometimes cited) after reaching 100 authors per category (authors, editors, etc). We would need some sort of indicator that authors were dropped though.

DWL-SDCA

By what criteria can one become an "author"?

When the number of author words (Firstname, Lastname) approaches the number of words in the article text, something is wrong with the journal's authorship policy. In this case there are about 20 authors who are listed as deceased -- some of whom died _many_ years ago.

While Zotero should not be responsible for setting authorship standards, surely this is something that needs to be addressed. Perhaps, in style guides. Styles that suggest citing all authors fail for author lists such as this. A citation of this article would alone exceed the maximum word count requirements for some journals.

This article, like many with long author lists, places the author names ordered by alphabet. First few authors with last author policies have no meaning here.

Most of the authors of this particular article are also co-authors of many other articles that have absurdly unwieldy author lists. In many cases, the authors' names are not printed in the same form when compared article to article. This makes for messy connections in bibliographic databases and disambiguation problems for those who wish to cite these articles.

At my SafetyLit database, after consulting with the science content advisory committee, we set a maximum number of authors of a journal article at 100. This seemed at the time a ridiculously large number. If more than 100 authors are attached to a record, the 101st author name is "Other Listed Authors" -- sort of the counterpart to "No Author(s) Listed".

adamsmith

no, the 1000+ author papers are standard in high-energy physics. We can't really do anything about this and given the enormous scope of the experiments they run, it's not necessarily wrong (and may very well follow the same criteria used by smaller labs).

I do think 100 is a reasonable cut-off point though. Only question is whether last authors do or do not matter in these large lists in general. It'd be easier if we could just chop off the list after 100 the way SafetyLit does.

I think noksagt works in broadly related fields, he may have insight into that.

aurimas

In this particular case, the last author is "The ATLAS collaboration", which seems like a reasonable author to keep (if not use to replace all of the authors in that list)