Zotero saving wrong article name to citation

isabelle-b

Hi guys!

I think this issue may stem from Google or CBS, but I'm wondering if there is a way for Zotero to not be affected by this issue.

I recently tried to make citations from some CBS news articles from 2014 using Zotero. I saved the citation to a folder how I usually would, but when I tried to create a footnote, I couldn't find it. I saw there was a citation with a different article name, but it had the correct URL.

This same issue has happened with other articles too. When I searched up the article name that Zotero gave me on Google, the correct article popped up, even though the article I typed in appears no where within the article. I'm not sure why this is happening, but is there any way to ensure that Zotero saves the correct article name?

One of the articles that Zotero saved is "Thomas Datre Sr, Jr On Trial For Toxic Dumping In Brentwood" but those words don't appear in the actual article. The actual title is "Defense Comes Out Swinging In Highly Publicized Long Island Dumping Trial."

Thank you!

AbeJellinek

In the particular case you mentioned, the former title ("On Trial For Toxic Dumping") is what CBS put in their metadata, the latter ("Defense Comes Out Swinging") in the actual body of the article. It's intentional - they're trying to cover more keywords and optimize the headline differently for the various places it gets displayed. But since Zotero's Embedded Metadata translator takes the metadata at its word, you'll sometimes get confusing results.

isabelle-b

That makes a lot of sense, thank you for explaining!

DWL-SDCA

FWIW at my university's journalism department there is a requirement to include both titles by treating one of the options as a sub-head or subtitle. "On Trial For Toxic Dumping: Defense Comes Out Swinging". This requires hand-editing but it seems worth the effort.

isabelle-b

That makes a lot of sense. I know some blog post writers try to make their titles as SEO friendly as possible – I never considered a website might use a completely different title in the backend! I would imagine that could cause all sorts of issues. Good to know that there is a journalistic standard out there that avoids some of that.

DWL-SDCA

Just to be clear... I'm not sure that this "standard" is widespread or only local. It is important to understand that the difference can go beyond metadata vs. screen headline. It is common for a news site to present the same article but with different screen headlines designed to attract clicks from different audiences. The headline you view can vary with your ISP location, the browser you use, and several other factors.

edit: Some (quite legitimate) news organizations will arbitrarily vary headlines as a test to see what may attract the greater number of clicks.

isabelle-b

Good to know!