RIS Export Author Handling

awenner

Zotero's RIS exporting is buggy when handling primary and secondary authors. Consider this reference:

Schmitter, Phillip C. "Civil Society East and West." In Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies: Themes and Perspectives, edited by Larry Diamond, Mark F. Plattner, Yun-han Chu and Hung-mao Tien, 239-62. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

There is a primary author, Phillip C. Schmitter, and a bunch of secondary authors. Zotero exports a RIS file as follows:

TY - CHAP
ID - 2993
T1 - Civil Society East and West
JF - Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies: Themes and Perspectives
CY - Baltimore
A1 - Schmitter,Phillip C.
A2 - Diamond,Larry
A2 - Plattner,Mark F.
A2 - Chu,Yun-han
A2 - Tien,Hung-mao
PB - Johns Hopkins University Press
PY - 1997///
N2 -
ER -

The problem is that when it gets to Endnote (both X1 and X2), we get this:

Schmitter, Phillip C., Larry Diamond, Mark F. Plattner, Yun-han Chu, and Hung-mao Tien. "Civil Society East and West." In Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies: Themes and Perspectives, 239-62. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Endnote gets confused and adds all the authors to the primary author category. Now, the RIS guidelines for Author tags on the Endnote website give two options: A1 for primary authors and A2 for secondary authors, or else AU for author and ED for editor. But in practice, it only seems to like the second category. When I correct the author info and export it back into RIS, I get this:

TY - CHAP
AU - Schmitter, Phillip C.
PY - 1997
BT - Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies: Themes and Perspectives
ED - Diamond, Larry
ED - Plattner, Mark F.
ED - Chu, Yun-han
ED - Tien, Hung-mao
CT - Civil Society East and West
CY - Baltimore
PB - Johns Hopkins University Press
SP - 239-262
N1 - Civil Society East and West
ID - 96
ER -

It's clear the system is buggy, but who's fault is this? Which RIS export system should Zotero use?

dstillman

Well, it seems the main problem is that the ever-helpful RIS spec doesn't specifically define ED as editor, but it's probably generally used that way in practice. (Of course, when it comes to RIS, you might also assume that, say, the free text field AB is abstract, but no, you'd be wrong.)

So we should probably change the RIS translator to map ED to editor on import and export. Ticket created. Thanks.

awenner

Cool.

I tried slightly modifying the Zotero RIS files by changing only one instance of A2 to ED and found that EndNote choked completely and didn't grab any of the authors. It seems like EndNote wants RIS files to be consistent in their styles, and that it doesn't like you to mix and match. Just a heads up for the debugging process.

dstillman

Hmm, that may have to be up to them to fix, then. Zotero uses A2 for all other non-author creator types (e.g., 'contributor'), so if we mapped ED to editor (which does seem like an improvement) there would be a combination of the two. As far as I can tell, the RIS spec doesn't give any indication that you shouldn't be able to use both.

awenner

Well, I'd give it a try and see. To be fair, I mixed and matched A2 and ED within the same "secondary author" field. If I have the time I'll try seeing what happens if you only have EDs. In the meantime, it would be nice to at least map "ED" to editor. Then EndNote would be only slightly broken.

(Of course, I'm only going through this whole rigamarole because I need to use Word 2008, and EndNote X2 is the only program that supports it. Once Z 1.5 comes into public beta, this won't be a problem anymore. Hint, hint.)

awenner

FYI, I fixed the problem by mucking around in EndNote's style manager. I changed it to recognize T2 as Editor. This should probably go in the FAQ, as I'm sure others are having this problem as well, and it's not Zotero's fault.