global author and date editing

keith.w.larson@gmail · April 21, 2012

Is it possible in Zotero or via some other external tool, e.g. R, to clean-up all of the authors names to remove the full first names and only have initials. In the biological sciences I am unaware of any journals that require full author names. For example in my database I might have a citation with "Larson, Keith W." or "Larson, Keith.

Further, in the database I often have citations with "Larson, K", "Larson, K.", "Larson, KW", "Larson, K.W.", and "Larson, K. W.". Is there any way to have a consistent author style throughout my database? This would also apply to dates, e.g. I only need the year for my citations, not month day year, or month year.

aurimas · April 21, 2012

When these entries are cited in text the citation style automatically drops any extra information it does not need. Zotero always tries to store the most complete entry, because some citation styles might need more information than others. But to answer your question, doing this automatically is not possible in Zotero (yet anyway)

adamsmith · April 21, 2012

@aurimas - that's actually not quite correct: citeproc (i.e. the way Zotero generates citations) is sensitive to different spellings of an author and will assume they are different authors and e.g. sort them differently and disambiguate them in author-date styles, so this is in fact a bit of a problem.

As to the original question, batch editing is planned for the 3.5 version, but until then aurimas is correct, there is no way to do this but manually.