NPG publication date

borgh
I just came across an interesting bug(?) when grabbing a paper from Nature Photonics (http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v6/n1/full/nphoton.2011.267.html). The reference for this paper is Nat. Photonics 6, 50-55 (2012). Note the year of publication. However it was "Published online" 13 November 2011. Interestingly, Zotero grabs the "Published online" date, rather than the date of physical publication, and therefore gets the year wrong when exporting, e.g. as BibTeX.

Of course, this phenomenon would only happen when a paper is published in advance online at the end of the year, to appear in print in the following year. Normally the year would be the same, and day and month usually don't appear in the list of references anyway. However it is a somewhat subtle way of getting a reference wrong.

Preferably, Zotero ought to grab the year/date of "actual" publication when one is available. How to handle papers that are grabbed online before physical publication is an intricate question.
  • adamsmith
    Aurimas submitted a fix for this a while ago, this should work correctly now.
  • archsteve
    I just started using Zotero, and this is not fixed. I have the same problem with published dates and online published dates. I am using firefox, and have a mac (mountain lion OS).
  • adamsmith
    It's fixed at least for the URL given above. Where are you seeing this problem?
  • archsteve
    I collected quite a few citations from google scholar. Now, I am putting them into a word document, and I noticed several dates that were off. When I looked these up, sure enough it was giving the online publication date. So, I suppose tied to google scholar "grabs".
  • adamsmith
    we can't do anything about that on google scholar. I recommend against using google scholar as a source more generally, the data is very low quality - missing first names, inconsistent journal titles, missing page numbers etc.
  • DWL-SDCA
    what @adamsmith said.

    In addition you can use Google Scholar to discover items but you should go to the publishers' websites to get your citation metadata. The same with Microsoft Academic Search.
  • cohen_tom
    I was having this issue with "retrieve metadata for pdf" (see specific reference below). Zotero imported from Google Scholar and the metadata were both inaccurate with respect to year and incomplete. So I tried using the DOI instead and this brought in a fuller record from CrossRef but this too was wrong on publication year.
    Of the various sources of aggregated data, does any perform better than the rest on average?

    The offending article has DOI 10.1177/1354066111413308
  • adamsmith
    CrossRef is always better than Google Scholar. The publisher sites and databases for journal articles are almost always bettern than CrossRef. Pubmed is quite excellent if the citation is included there.
    Retrieve Metadata will work somewhat better - and more often find the DOI and use CrossRef - in the next Zotero version, due out soon.
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