Pubmed import of fields

Hi Everyone:
My most common use of Zotero is in importing Pubmed citations. I just recently noticed that Zotero apparently does not import author affilation fields/data. If this is the case, is there a way as a user to manipulate the metadata that Zotero imports from Pubmed and then in what fields it is stored?
  • Zotero doesn't have a field for author affiliation, so where would we import that to? All import into Zotero is done by individual javascript files (in the "translators" folder in the Zotero data directory) and those can be relatively easily modified, provided you know some javascript.
  • edited November 14, 2017
    Please be aware that author affiliation in PubMed metadata is rather messy. In 2014-15 PubMed switched from a single author affiliations field for all authors to an affiliation field for each author. The metadata from before this switch wasn’t updated to the new standard.

    However, the current metadata from publishers often is not author specific but grouped information for all authors. Further complicating things is that this grouped affiliation information can end up connected to the first author or the final author with some authors having no affiliations. Rarely, but frequently enough to be really annoying, the list of all author affiliations is assigned to every single author.

    One of the reasons for the switch to affiliation fields for each author was to eliminate the letter, number, or special character that preceeded each affiliation in the grouped affiliation list — characters that “connected” each author with their affiliation. However, even when publishers provide affiliation metadata for each author, many times the connector character(s) appear with the institution names. [edit Thank goodness that these characters are almost always removed fron the end of authors’ names.]

    Further complicating things is the situation when authors are listed with more than one affiliation. Some publishers’ metadata includes all of an author’s affiliations and some publishers include only one of them.
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