Query re global changes in Titles and abbreviations for months

I am editing endnotes according to the style my publisher wants and need to make changes in certain frequently used titles, e.g., The New York Times to New York Times or NYT
Also I want to change December to Dec. etc. and make that consistent across dozens, hundreds probably of endnote citations.
Is there a way to do this with some global find and replace command or must I do it note by note?
  • It's possible to change date abbreviations in the style that you're using.

    To use abbreviations for certain names, you may(!) be able to use the abbreviations plugin, but I don't know any details about this and it's still in alpha or early beta or so:
    http://citationstylist.org/abbreviations-for-zotero/

    It's not currently possible to batch-edit Zotero entries, though it likely will be in the near future.
  • How do I change the date abbreviations first?
    I'm not sure I want to risk the citation abbreviations.
    When do you expect an upgrade that can handle batch editing of entries?
  • which citation style are you using?

    Last I heard, batch-editing was planned for Zotero 3.5 due out late this fall, but I'm not 100% about the status of that (the batch editing part - I'm pretty sure 3.5 will be out in November bc of compatibility issues).
  • I'm using Chicago Manual of Style full notes with Word 2010 on a Windows 7 platform
  • For style adjustments in general see here:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
    Specifically for months:
    Find all instances of
    <date-part name="month" suffix=" "/>
    (I think there are only two) and change them to
    <date-part name="month" suffix=" " form="short"/>
  • I thought I could do this but I'm not getting abbreviated months in the citations I've experimented with. I went into the csl file Zotero is using, cmos
    chicago-fullnote-bibliography-no-ibid.csl
    and I found the two "date-part ..." strings you describe and replaced them with the new string.
    I went in and out of Firefox and started a new word document.
    No dice. The months still come up "December" etc.
  • edited August 26, 2012
    I wrote too soon! I got it working. There were more of those strings than I thought and then I realized Notepad was saving it as a (useless) *.txt file instead of retaining its .csl extension. That was easy to fix once I realized what I was doing.

    Thanks
  • note that notepad (as opposed to serious text editors) sometimes messes up unicode characters, such as the em-dashes used to substitute repeated authors in the bibliography, so you should test with your style whether that's still working.
  • How does one use a serious text editor. I saw on Zotero actions > preferences > advanced that there is a csl editor but I did not know how to use it properly. I bet it is not that hard and I welcome your instruction.
  • we recommend a couple here:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
    I like notepad++
    I believe Dan likes jEdit
    both are free and open source.

    Zotero's built-in editor doesn't help here, because it doesn't allow you to save styles - so even if you use that you still need to use a text editor to save the style as .csl.

    The editor that comes with the visual editor
    http://steveridout.com/csl/visualEditor/
    is quite nice and that has a one-click save option.
  • I'm usually the one recommending jEdit. Sublime Text (http://www.sublimetext.com/) is also quite nice (see
    http://www.marco.org/2012/08/10/next-text-editor for a review). It's a cross-platform, free to evaluate, commercial editor.
  • Sublime Text is good, but it's probably better to recommend genuinely free tools for casual style authors (even if ST currently has an unlimited free trial).

    adamsmith was right, though—I use jEdit personally and have recommended it before. But most Mac and Windows users don't need to install Java these days, so I think native programs (e.g., TextWrangler for OS X, Notepad++ for Windows) are generally better to recommend.
  • In the meantime, I was able to save time in converting my citations with The New York Times to NYT by doing an advanced search in my Zotero library, entering The New York Times in the window for "Publication" and clicking on search. I had to enter NYT each time, but Zotero remembers that and it became easier as I went. Then, I thought I would have to go through each offending endnote to make the change, but after doing one or two I realized that Zotero was doing it for me in all the remaining 60 odd notes. That helped.
    That said, to have a "search and replace" batch edit function for future versions of Zotero would be wonderful.
  • I don't understand how it works. I tried installing the Abbreviation Filter but I don't see it in the Word plug in when I click on "add-ins" Where do I find it and how does one use it?
    thanks
  • edited October 14, 2012
    Sorry, that was a bit cryptic. If you open the Classic View when editing a citation, you should find an "abbrevs." button in the upper left-hand corner of the dialog box. Clicking on the button will open another dialog, from which you can select from a set of categories. "Journals and Reporters" will show a list of journals that the current style wants to abbreviate.

    If the style is not configured to use short titles for journals, the list will be empty. The Nature style seems to use short titles -- but note that the processor has to "see" the short-form entries to add them to the list, so for Nature (and other author-date or numeric styles) you'll need to include a bibliography to generate the listing.
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