Pubmed translator pulling incorrect information (recently)

hgskinner
Citations I have been pulling from Pubmed seem to be pulling the "Publication" field from the "alt text" of the journal title instead of the full title of the journal itself.

For example, this article
yield a Publication of "Cancer epidemiology, biomarkers & prevention: a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, cosponsored by the American Society of Preventive Oncology" instead of "Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev." Maybe the alt text used to provide the correct information and something has changed in the format?
  • DWL-SDCA
    The very-long journal title is what PubMed provides in the metadata for this article and for all articles in this journal. Both PubMed's xml and tagged formats have this as the title. Are you asking for an abreviation instead?
  • hgskinner
    What I was expecting was the full journal title. Looking at citations that I pulled previously from this Journal, it used to be pulled as "Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention" with an abbreviated title of "Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev".

    Another example is (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18243368). The full title used to be pulled as "Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics", but is now "Archives of gerontology and geriatrics" without appropriate capitalization.

    I realize that Zotero can only pull the data that is there, but it would be nice to have the full journal title be correct for reference formats that do not use the abbreviated form.
  • adamsmith
    same as above - "Archives of gerontology and geriatrics" is what PubMed has in the XML data it provides. I don't think we can do much about those types of things - try contacting pubmed instead.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited May 22, 2012
    The NLM is in the process of converting all journal titles to sentence case. During this conversion they are also beginning to use the full official title of the journal. Abbreviations of NLM-listed journals will not change (yet). There is talk of making abbreviations sentence case (first character of the first abbreviated term in upper case and abbreviations of proper nouns also in upper case.)

    The journal title listings in the NLM catalog have been in sentence case for a long time.

    Note that the OCLC WorldCat also uses sentence case for journal titles. I don't currently have access to Ulrich's but from my memory, they also follow this sentence case convention.

    Edit: Genamics JournalSeek uses title case.
  • Simon
    Styles can and should be title-casing journal titles, no?
  • DWL-SDCA
    @Simon Yes, but only for styles that specify title-case.
  • Simon
    Obviously. But if the styles want title case but don't specify it, that's a style bug, not a translator bug.
  • adamsmith
    I'm not a big fan of applying auto title case to journal titles, but I guess we'll have to (it will mess, e.g., with Latin journal titles like "Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata"). It's nothing I/we will be able to change, but imho journal titles are proper names and should _never_ be in sentence case.
  • aurimas
    The automatic capitalization has been going on for a while (it's coded in the NCBI PubMed translator), it just got turned off with 3.0.4 when the flag for capitalizeTitle was flipped. So we just need to force it now.
  • DWL-SDCA
    ...imho journal titles are proper names and should _never_ be in sentence case.
    While I tend to agree, it seems that those who set cataloging standards do not. I became even more OCD than usual and went searching for rules and why the rules. I found plenty of rules but I still cannot find the rationale for the rule.

    The Anglo-American Cataloging Rules 2nd Edition (AACRC2), the CONSER Cataloging Manual, the OCLC Bibliographic Formats and Standards, and the IFLA-ISBD standards all set the title case requirement as:

    For titles in English, capitalize the first word of the title and any proper names that appear in the title. For titles in other languages and scripts, follow any capitalization conventions of those languages and scripts. For non-English titles translated to English pay particular attention to the original language convention for adjectival forms for proper nouns.
  • aurimas
    Are those for journal titles or article titles?
  • DWL-SDCA
    I looked up the standard for journal titles. I didn't so thoroughly check for article titles. Another quick look it appears that mostly the case standards for article titles isn't specifically established by catalog standards entities. Where it is, articles are represented in sentence case. Even when case isn't mentioned as a standard, examples of article titles are displayed in sentence case.

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