How could be used Zotero in editorial work?

LiborA

Zotero is my favourite software. I use it as an author in the preparation of my manuscripts. As the editor of a small scholarly journal, I use it during the publishing process to grab and format references in all accepted manuscripts. Does anyone use Zotero for other purposes in editorial work?

DWL-SDCA

I am curator of a multidisciplinary bibliographic database concerning safety. We index journal articles and reports from more than 35 distinct professional disciplines (not counting medical and engineering sub-specialties). We used to receive metadata files from publishers' that covered full journal issues or volumes. As we index few journals cover-to-cover that meant receiving metadata, viewing it in our editor, and discarding hundreds of records. We now now view articles on the publishers' websites, download (only) relevant items to Zotero. We use Zotero to edit the records and export in MODS format to import into our system. Zotero translators are kept current. This is a substantial improvement over getting metadata from publisher ftp sites where each publisher seemed to change the format every year.

edit: In addition to our agreements with journal publishers, we also have interchange agreements with US government and NGO public databases such as AGRICOLA, ERIC, PubMed, and TRID. We use Zotero to capture their records (from those with compatible systems) and we share our Zotero-translated records with them via MODS or RIS to add to their database.

LiborA

Thank, I also rather download metadata directly from the publishers' websites. For me it seems that the metadata on the publishers' websites are more accurate than metadata on the databases such Scopus or Web of Science.

DWL-SDCA

@LiborA
You comment that publisher sites are more accurate and complete.
In my experience it is always better to get the metadata directly from the publisher. Certainly, so with Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic.

I don't use most commercial databases because I believe that their data is proprietary but I do take notice of the journals they follow (and include those relevant journals into our search strategy). Clearly, Web of Science management believes that they want to be able to demonstrate that _their_ metadata has been taken. Web of Science has long inserted out-and-out Mountweazel records, also changes in the punctuation of article titles, changes in the spelling of American English words to British spellings and vice-versa in the titles and abstracts. WoS often shortens author names by omitting "middle" names that are included in publisher metadata. [edit: I know this from grading graduate student class papers and evaluating masters and doctoral theses. I always verify that the citations are to real publications and that the publications support what the student asserts. Too often the students will cite something cited by another without reading the original and the citation was hollow. I've had a student cite a WoS Mountweazel.]

Sometimes Scopus does the opposite (I think in an attempt to condense to a single representation when there are several versions of an author's name on different publications). I have no idea how they do this -- manually or by some algorithm. (I think that there might be some automated 2-way ORCID connection.) Sometimes they get it wrong. It seems that they prefer to err on the combine-them rather than keep the names discrete. One problem is with publications by women who marry. Articles published under Mary Smith are renamed when other articles are published under the married name Mary Smith-Jones. edit: I know of one example where, after a divorce, the author began publishing with her original name but Scopus metadata has kept using her hyphenated married name for the newer publications.