Date issue when importing from Blackwell

asplundj · March 19, 2008

For some Blackwell journals the date is wrongly imported

try http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2007.01319.x

sean · March 19, 2008

Unfortunately, it's not a Zotero problem: Blackwell is generating bad metadata. In this case the publication field in their exported metadata is:

Y1 - 2007/05/121

kajeling · March 24, 2008

I don't know if it's advisable to fix this as it feels a little like hard-coding, but I put this line in my copy of the translator, at the beginning of the doPost function:

var m = text.match(/(Y1\s+-\s[0-9]{4}\/[0-9]{2}\/[0-9]{2})/);
if(m){
text = text.replace(/Y1\s.*\n/, m[1] + "\n");
}

Is there a way to submit possible translator fixes? I have a few that I have found useful.

sean · March 24, 2008

kajeling: Thanks for looking into this problem. Your translator fixes would be greatly appreciated. You can register for a trac account and commit translator changes to our repository.

In this particular case, I would be worried that we might be throwing away good data, since it's not immediately clear what's causing the problem in the first place on Blackwell's end (e.g. is the date supposed to be 12 May or 21 May or neither?). When a site is offering structured metadata, it's probably in the best interest of the end user to do a little transformation as possible. Otherwise it won't be transparent what's happening between the RIS file and what shows up in the Zotero db.

kajeling · March 24, 2008

Fair enough. Would be nice to know where the hell that extra number comes from.

Just for the record, though, it's definitely supposed to be may 12. The article that brought this problem to my attention originally had the date 2007/10/274.

kajeling · March 26, 2008

I just tried signing up for a trac account, and the sign-up form didn't seem to indicate anything about success or failure after I submitted. It was just completely blank, and I have received no email regarding account creation. How is it supposed to work?

dstillman · March 27, 2008

I just tried signing up for a trac account, and the sign-up form didn't seem to indicate anything about success or failure after I submitted.

It was a problem on our end. Should work again now.

Translators aren't actually open for public SVN commits at the present time, and ticket creation privileges on Trac are also limited, but if you have a particular bug you want to fix, just post a message here with the Trac ticket you'd like created, and you'll be able to attach your patch to that ticket.