APA 7th ed surname in biblio error

I noticed that a number of articles with Chinese authors or authors with non-American name order show up incorrectly in the "Create Bibliography" and "Create Citation" output. Li-Fang Zhang appeared as sole author on an PDF article I referenced yesterday, and the PDF of the article showed Zhang as the surname in the article header. The Zotero auto-generated full citation read out as Li-Fang, Z. rather than Zhang, L. though.

I doubt the metadata tag from the publishers would be incorrect, but it's certainly possible. I make it a point to review all entries and manually correct anything that sounds Asian in origin just to make sure the names are formatted properly, but every other name appears correctly so far. Thoughts? Just keep on keepin' on, I guess?

Becca
  • I doubt the metadata tag from the publishers would be incorrect, but it's certainly possible.
    I'm afraid you're vastly overconfident in publisher metadata: Anything other than standard English and English-type names (starting with something as simple as Spanish names with two last names) get mangled in the metadata all the time, even by reputable publishers.

    You can certainly provide details of where the metadata comes from (i.e. typically a URL) and we can take a look, but for names in particular I'm not super optimistic.

  • Allow me to expand on adamsmith's correct assessment of the quality of author name metadata from very reputable publishers. Up until a few years ago my (non-Zotero) database service routinely downloaded article metadata from publisher ftp sites. It was then and is now filled with errors. The author metadata captured by Zotero translators corrects some of those errors. I've never found errors introduced by Zotero. My service stopped using the direct-from-publisher metadata in favor of Zotero's more accurate metadata. Visiting publisher websites and using Zotero to capture the metadata for selected items is a bit more effort up front but saves a lot of time overall.
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