Taylor & Francis curly quotes en- & em-dashes

DWL-SDCA
When I import TFG journal articles the characters listed above (in the topic title) do not import properly but as a "?". This seems to be a problem mainly in the abstract text. The characters in most article titles seem OK. I have noticed this with several TFG journals lately. I can provide several DOI numbers as examples.

10.1080/19439962.2011.614374
10.1080/19439962.2011.624291
10.1080/19439962.2011.614374
10.1080/19439962.2010.506596
10.1080/19439962.2010.506355
10.1080/19439962.2010.508571
10.1080/19439962.2011.615461

Obviously, the abstract text problem is not a high priority issue but if this can be easily fixed I would be very happy.

Thanks.
  • aurimas
    I will look into this.
  • aurimas
    edited April 9, 2012
    Basically, Zotero uses the Taylor & Francis citation export tool. Their RIS export has the '?' instead of the dashes, so that's why Zotero imports them this way.

    An alternative to RIS would be the BibTeX format, which exports the dashes properly. However, their BibTeX format does not supply the Publisher and ISSN information. So you are either missing some dashes or some metadata and I think the former is less bad.

    I would suggest contacting Taylor & Francis and asking them to fix their export formats. It seems that they are really pushing for compatibility with their RIS export, so they might have a reason not to change '?' to dashes. Personally, I prefer BibTeX anyway as it is more structured, so if they could fix that, it would be great and we could release a fix for the translator right away.
  • adamsmith
    The downside of bibtex is that it doesn't follow one single standard - there are a lot of ideosyncratic bibtex flavors and that's why we have preferred RIS in many places - though aurimas is of course right that otherwise bibtex is a more structured, richer format. I'd see if you can get a response from T&F here. Otherwise, we can still hack this with the RIS by replacing ? in the page range with a hyphen or en-dash (which doesn't matter all that much - CSL determines the pange-range delimiter anyway) - I don't think a ? should ever be part of a page range.
  • DWL-SDCA
    I couldn't find improper punctuation for page ranges but year ranges sometimes appear with the ? symbol. The greatest problems are with the em-dash and plural possessives. (Although, having a question mark instead of a curley double quote is an annoyance.) The ? makes it seem at first glance as though the sentence has ended and is a question.

    I will try to get T&F to fix this. I will post any news of progress.

    Would it be OK for if I could get T&F to substitute straight quotes for curly quotes, the hyphen for en-dash, and double-hyphen for em-dash? They may be more likely to agree with that option than
    to use the proper characters.

    Thanks for looking into the details of this problem.
  • adamsmith
    sorry, I misread something - much harder to fix then without any changes from T&F.
  • aurimas
    Would it be OK for if I could get T&F to substitute straight quotes for curly quotes, the hyphen for en-dash, and double-hyphen for em-dash? They may be more likely to agree with that option than to use the proper characters
    That would be fine. We would just import it the way they export, so if that's ok with the end-user, it's fine with us.
    I couldn't find improper punctuation for page ranges but year ranges sometimes appear with the ? symbol.
    You're referring to year range inside the abstract, correct? We would be most concerned about odd characters in fields other than abstract. If those occur, we would want to try and handle them. Post links if you find something.

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