Sciencedirect author parsing fails
Since a recent update (to SD or to the SD translator?) everything I save from ScienceDirect has the author name parsed in the wrong way -- e.g. Charles D. Yang becomes "Charles D." (last name) "Yang" (last name).
Please try this SD record:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661304002104
When downloaded into Zotero standalone using the address bar icon I get "Charles D., Yang" in the address field.
This is the same kind of problem I wrote about in an earlier Forum post
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/20234/
The data problem is with SD not with Zotero. Using the ScienceDirect export to EndNote the resulting file when viewed in a text editor has the first and last names reversed.
This doesn't happen with every SD record but with some. Also, I find that when an article has multiple authors all names are usually in the correct firstname and lastname fields. However, that isn't always the case. A couple of weeks ago (when I was paying close attention) it seemed that about one in five article records with multiple authors had at least one of the author names reversed but some with the correct order.
I have noticed the same behavior with InderScience and IngentaConnect article records.
This was the reason I requested that Zotero implement a quick way to edit the order of the author names.
Further, I have started an investigation of the prevalence of citations in published articles where author first and last names are reversed. I am finding many of these errors in print. This has implications for the quality of peer review of manuscripts, the assessment of faculty standings based upon the number of citations, the quality of citation index listings, etc.
If that's the problem mark has, it's not a parsing failure.
As I note there, since it's inconsistent between records but consistently bad in any given record, there's absolutely nothing to be done on the translator side of things - the best Zotero can do is to make fixing it easier (which should be done IMHO - discussion on that in DWL's original thread).
Gee, so it's a problem with SD's metdata. I will report to them (tho from previous experience that means getting a load of emails from clueless customer representatives and moving all the way up the chain to someone who partly understands the problem and then 'reports it to the IT dept' and you never hear from them again...).
Any thoughts?
invert names F:L<>L:F
invert name order F:L<>L:F
invert name fields F:L<>L:F
Since I don't think this is going to be a huge time saver for many people, it really can't have any possible downsides.