How to abstract month of publication from a journal article

davisroe

Hi, I am wondering if there is a good method of abstracting a date of publication that includes not only the year an article was published but the month as well. So far when I upload an article to Zotero, I am only seeing the year it was published appear in the date field of info section on Zotero.

I am relatively new to Zotero so there may be something obvious I am missing.

Thank you!

adamsmith

Depends on the publisher -- we're trying to get all the data we get on import and many places import with exactly publication dates for journal articles. Where are you importing from?

davisroe

Hi thank you. I'm importing from SafetyLit. I realized that SafteyLit doesn't provide the month of publication without accessing the article itself. After doing some experimenting it seems like Zotero will pull as much info about the date as is available (on SafteyLit this is only the year of publication). I most likely must open the actual article itself and save that to Zotero to pull the month of publication. Is this correct?

DWL-SDCA

Warning: more about SafetyLit than about Zotero.
I'm responsible for SafetyLit. Please provide a use-case and we might add month or day of publication. We dropped month and day because some publisher metadata only provided the pre-publication specific date while others (say, weekly-pubs such as JAMA) had a real publication date. When assigned to an issue some publishers update the publication date and others do not. This ambiguity led to students receiving lower grades on reports when their professors disagreed with the publication date listed in the cite. We received many complaints about "too-specific" dates; so we dropped everything but the year. I'm a reviewer for several journals and sometimes (not rarely) other reviewers will complain about the publication date of cited references. Explain why you need the full date as opposed to the year and I'll revisit this issue. Are there styles that *require* the month/day? You can email me directly from the address on the SafetyLit website.