Year info not taken while importing reference from pubmed

rmjohn

Hi,
I was saving a number of references from pubmed and I noticed that for some of the references, zotero has not captured the Year info and for some it has also not captured teh Journal info even though both exist in the actual pubmed citation. Any ideas?

dstillman

Can you provide examples?

rmjohn

Yes. Search (("pakistan"[Title/Abstract]) AND ("tobacco"[Title/Abstract])) AND (pakistan tobacco) in pubmed and you will get 62 references. Out of this there will be a couple of them which wont display years.

Rintze

Some of these papers use a different XML structure to store the date when the paper was published. All three failing papers on the first results page (e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17244976) use the following structure:

<PubDate>
<MedlineDate>2007 Jan-Mar</MedlineDate>
</PubDate>
whereas the translator only accepts

<PubDate>
<Year>2008</Year>
</PubDate>
which is used for most papers.

P.S. This behavior is also documented:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/licensee/elements_descriptions.html#pubdate

rmjohn

Thanks. Interesting observation. An ignorant question. Cant the translator be modified to accept different kinds of structures?

Rintze

Normally, yes. I'm just not certain how easily Zotero can parse the contents of these MedlineDate-elements, which always seem to specify a date-range.

Rintze

Another patch for the NCBI Pubmed translator, this time to read the contents of PubDate.MedlineDate when available:

http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-dev/web/NCBI PubMed date.patch