wrong journal abbreviation in MEDLINE list?

peregrinustyss

The abbreviation of the German journal “Zeitschrift für Evidenz, Fortbildung und Qualität im Gesundheitswesen” seems to be wrong in the list used for automatic journal abbreviation. It is shown as “Z. Für Evidenz Fortbild. Qual. Im Gesundheitswesen” in my test file, but should be “Z Evid Fortbild Qual Gesundhwes” (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/101477604 for details).

Is this forum the right place to address this issue?
Is it possible to see the whole list used for automatic journal abbreviation?

adamsmith

Yes this is the right place, though not sure how quickly we can fix it.

The abbreviations list is the abbreviations.json file you can download from here:
https://github.com/zotero/zotero/tree/4.0/resource/schema

though it's a bit more complicated than a pure list: it also has an algorithm for dealing with any journal and that's apparently not working correctly here (though I thought it should be able to work for non-English journals).

peregrinustyss

Thanks for the reply.

About the “how quickly” part: any hint about what to expect? Can I consider it “known” now? Might it be included in the next update (whenever that is?)

The list is very interesting because it doesn’t seem to conform to the NLM rules at all (or am I mistaken to take NLM/Pubmed abbreviations for MEDLINE abbreviations?). The rules according to http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/constructitle.html specify all punctuation to be removed, which is not the case with the list.

The algorithm you mention isn’t working properly for German indeed. In my example, the German particles "für" and "im" are capitalized, which is correct according to the NLM rules, but not correct for German (as you know) and should be omitted. If I understand the list resp. JSON correctly, this could be included into the list/algorithm.

But wouldn’t it be better to just display the whole journal title if it is not included in the list? Because no algorithm would guess that the German word “Gesundheitswesen” could be abbreviated to “Gesundhwes”, as is the case. And this way you get a wrong abbreviation that could be critized by journal editors …

adamsmith

No, I really don't know when to expect a fix. fixing the individual name is trivial, of course, (by simply adding it to the list) but that's not really a solution. You can consider it known, though.

Adding periods is on purpose because citation styles can strip them but not add them (and many journals that otherwise use Medline abbreviations do want periods). If that's wrong in the style you're using, you can report that separately.

In many cases, the algorithm should actually get German right -- it has a fair amount of German words and word particles. Indeed, the algorithm does get most abbreviations right, since NLM rules are pretty straightforward, so just leaving unknown journals unabbreviated would be a bad idea overall.

peregrinustyss

Thanks for the explanations!