Date Added Being used by Zotero in Bibliographies

andrewgibbs
Version: 3.0b, however looking back at my list of references I have created recently, the problem was in 2.1 as well.

I select a title from my library. Right click on it. Select "Create Bibliography from selected item." Then copy to clipboard. (I used Nature Journal in this case, but the problem is with many of the formats.)

My result:

1.Tucker, J.W., Robinson, W.D. & Grubb, T. INFLUENCE OF SEASON AND FREQUENCY OF FIRE ON HENSLOW’S SPARROWS (AMMODRAMUS HENSLOWII) WINTERING ON GULF COAST PITCHER PLANT BOGS. The Auk 120, 96-106 (2011).

now from the Harvard author date format:

Tucker, J.W., Robinson, W.D. & Grubb, T., 2011. INFLUENCE OF SEASON AND FREQUENCY OF FIRE ON HENSLOW’S SPARROWS (AMMODRAMUS HENSLOWII) WINTERING ON GULF COAST PITCHER PLANT BOGS. The Auk, 120(1), pp.96-106.

The problem here is that this article was published in 2003:
The Auk 120(1):96-106. 2003

In the info tab in Zotero the date is listed:
2011/09/13 2003.

Please help! Thank you very very much for your product. It saves poor grad students like me a lot of money. When I am a famous scientist I will make huge donations to you!

-AG
  • adamsmith
    the problem is the way the date is entered into Zotero - it parses the first full date - i.e. 2011-9-13 - and then ignores whatever comes after it.
    The immediate solution is to just delete 2011/

    If you remember where you got that article from we might be able to do something about that more generally - all those capitals don't look good, either.
  • andrewgibbs
    No they don't. The article is through BioOne. I click their export link and zotero does the rest. The caps are on the BioOne website. I login with a proxy through my school. What is the best way to import references into zotero?
  • andrewgibbs
    Update: Fixing the date in the Zotero database did work. Strange that is importing like this though.
  • adamsmith
    The date thing looks like a problem in Zotero. (see below for technical details which you can ignore). Generally using the icon in the URL bar leads to better results than using manual export from sites and sites with specific Zotero translators (EBSCO, Sciencedirect, JSTOR, etc.) work best.

    The all caps is something they do. To correct the all caps, right-click on the title field in Zotero and select title case (or better yet, select lower case and manually transform to sentence case - only capitalize beginning of sentences and proper nouns).


    TY - JOUR

    T1 - Developing and Testing Criteria and Indicators for an Effective Information System in the Forest Sector

    AU - Garg, R.K.

    AU - Das, J.K.

    AU - Gera, M.

    Y1 - 2006/09/01

    PY - 2006

    DA - 2006/09/01

    N1 - doi: 10.1505/ifor.8.3.307

    DO - 10.1505/ifor.8.3.307

    T2 - International Forestry Review

    JF - International Forestry Review

    JO - International Forestry Review

    SP - 307

    EP - 328

    VL - 8

    IS - 3

    PB - Commonwealth Forestry Association

    SN - 1465-5489

    M3 - doi: 10.1505/ifor.8.3.307

    UR - http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1505/ifor.8.3.307

    Y2 - 2011/09/13

    ER -

    this looks good to me - I believe Y2 is commonly used for the access date and Zotero's RIS translator shouldn't overwrite it. Avram?
  • andrewgibbs
    Update #2 (my last for now). I originally searched in BioOne because I need to search a particular journal that they have. (The Auk) just completed my search in Google Scholar, and the results of the import into Zotero from GS are:

    Tucker Jr, J.W., Robinson, W.D. & Grubb, T. Influence of season and frequency of fire on Henslow’s Sparrows (Ammodramus henslowii) wintering on Gulf Coast pitcher plant bogs. The Auk 120, 96-106 (2003).

    Which is the correct result... This should do for me, but it seems a problem none the less. Thanks for your help. If you figure out a solution for BioOne let me know! Thanks again.

    -AG
  • andrewgibbs
    Thank you very much.
  • ajlyon
    It's somewhat unrelated, but you can add <i> </i> tags around the species name to get proper italics in the citation output.

    As for the Y2 field, we're currently appending it to the date, if present. There's no documentation on this, and access date isn't mentioned in the RIS spec. I'd fix this in the site-specific translator, but here we're importing RIS directly. Do you think this is worth changing in general?
  • adamsmith
    Yes, I've seen Y2 as accessed date on several occasions and I think it'd be good to change this generally - I'd even consider having Zotero export the accessed field as Y2. I vaguely recall this was discussed before, I'll search for it.
    If we're skeptical about this - e.g. because it could also be original date of publication (the RIS spec description is "secondary date") I'd prefer to not parse it at all to appending it to the publication date (which, as in this case, creates nonsensical date-fields).
  • ajlyon
    I've patched RIS to handle Y2 as described on import. Give it a spin. http://github.com/ajlyon/translators/raw/master/RIS.js
  • adamsmith
    that completely ignores Y2 for me (with the record above using direct import from bioone) - I'm fine with that, but judging by the comments in the translator code that's not what you went for.
  • ajlyon
    Hmm, not sure why that's happening. Maybe Zotero doesn't like to observe the specified accessDate. I also pushed a change to eliminate the extraneous doi: prefix on the DOI.
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