Changing Journal Citation Cases

tgliou · January 17, 2013

I've noticed that beginning sometime in 2011 through 2012, many journal titles obtained via PubMed have changed from title case to sentence case. For example, the "Journal of Clinical Investigation" is now the "Journal of clinical investigation". However, not all journals have made such a change, and there are occasional inconsistencies between pulling a citation from PubMed vs the journal site itself, eg, "Chest" from Pubmed vs "CHEST" from the Chest journal itself. Creating a bibliography often means inspecting the bibliography for changes within a journal or different conventions for different journals and making changes either in the Zotero citations or in the finished bibliography by hand.

Is there a way to 1) change the convention for all citations from a single journal within Zotero or 2) across journals with different conventions within a single bibliography that is not manual?

Thank you in advance!

adamsmith · January 17, 2013

1) no
2) you can adjust citation styles to use title case, all caps, and a "dumb" sentence case - it's not very hard to do. I don't particularly like to apply automated cases to journal titles on the repository, but that'd be the way to go.
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
(you want to work with text-case="title" on container-title)

My sense would be that all caps are always wrong - I've never seen that for any citation style in any journal - so we could fix that on import if you have a sample URL?

(On a side note - personally I think journal titles are proper names and should always be in title case, but I'm told by more knowledgeable people that cataloging standards suggest they be in sentence case - hence the recent change in PubMed, for example)

Rintze · January 17, 2013

It's not a translator error. CHEST really is spelled in all-caps: http://publications.chestnet.org/ss/about.aspx#Chest

adamsmith · January 17, 2013

thanks, I forgot they were a couple of shouting journals.
CHEST!
BONE!
BRAIN!
it sounds like a Zombie movie...

tgliou · January 17, 2013

Thanks for the quick answers. I'll try the citation styles adjustments and do manual edits as needed.

Pulling a citation from:

http://journal.publications.chestnet.org/article.aspx?articleid=1512435

gives the all caps, however, when quoting a Chest article, copy editors always object to the all caps and want "Chest" instead of "CHEST". Chest itself uses "Chest" in citations, see reference 2 in the paper in the link. Pubmed has used only the "Chest" style. Maybe I need to write to the editors at Chest?

tgliou · January 17, 2013

I should add, though, that when referring to itself in the text, the name is given as "CHEST". I guess this really is at least partially an issue with the Journal, not Zotero.

According to my orthopedic friends, the chest exists to supply oxygenated blood to BONE. According to my neurology friend....

adamsmith · January 17, 2013

@Rintze - thoughts? It's obviously easy to fix this to title case and if even CHEST cites itself as Chest it makes sense to fix it, no?

Rintze · January 17, 2013

If you click on "Get Citation", you get:

Spread The Word About The Journal In 2013
Irwin RS, Augustyn N, French CT, et al.
CHEST. 2013;143(1):1-4.
doi:10.1378/chest.12-2762.

so even CHEST/Chest editors are confused. (I'm not a librarian, but since the website and journal cover both use "CHEST", I would cite the journal as such)

tgliou · January 17, 2013

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. If I hear back from the editors, I'll post here.

DWL-SDCA · January 18, 2013

I'll need to check the latest standards but unless there has been a recent change, the two major English language cataloging guides state that the above journal titles and their abbreviations would not be in all caps. All caps are used only for journal titles that include an acronym : JAMA , Proc. IRCOBI, AORN j., etc.

tgliou · January 18, 2013

I wrote the editors and got back several replies. The name of the journal is in fact, "CHEST Journal." The approved abbreviation is "Chest." The Chest website when you click on "Get Citation" actually gives you the wrong result. The citation that Rintze got and posted above should have "Chest" in the line below Richard Irwin's name because that is supposed to be the abbreviated journal name. Nicki Augustyn at Chest has put the problem on a todo list for the journal. It's a responsive bunch there, but there are other issues to tend to first.

However, interestingly, it appears that the Pubmed librarians have it slightly wrong as well. They have the correct abbreviation, "Chest," which means that Zotero bibliography entries will be correct, but they also have the full name of the journal as "Chest" not "CHEST Journal" which is not accurate per the name on the actual printed copies of the journal. Here's the ascii citation information from Pubmed for the article above:

PMID- 23276834
OWN - NLM
STAT- In-Data-Review
DA - 20130101
IS - 1931-3543 (Electronic)
IS - 0012-3692 (Linking)
VI - 143
IP - 1
DP - 2013 Jan 1
TI - Spread the word about the journal in 2013: from citation
manipulation to
invalidation of patient-reported outcomes measures to renaming the clara
cell to
new journal features.
PG - 1-4
LID - 10.1378/chest.12-2762 [doi]
FAU - Irwin, Richard S
AU - Irwin RS
FAU - Augustyn, Nicki
AU - Augustyn N
FAU - French, Cynthia T
AU - French CT
FAU - Rice, Jean
AU - Rice J
FAU - Tedeschi, Victoria
AU - Tedeschi V
CN - Stephen J. Welch
LA - eng
PT - Journal Article
PL - United States
TA - Chest
JT - Chest
JID - 0231335
SB - AIM
SB - IM
EDAT- 2013/01/02 06:00
MHDA- 2013/01/02 06:00
CRDT- 2013/01/02 06:00
AID - 1512435 [pii]
AID - 10.1378/chest.12-2762 [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO - Chest. 2013 Jan 1;143(1):1-4. doi: 10.1378/chest.12-2762.

Note that the TA and JT lines are both "Chest" which I think is not quite right: one of these needs to be "CHEST Journal." From the CHEST Journal site, the citation is thus:

TY - JOUR
T1 - Spread the Word About the Journal in 2013Spread the Word About the Journal in 2013From Citation Manipulation to Invalidation of
Patient-Reported Outcomes Measures to Renaming the Clara Cell to New
Journal Features
AU - Irwin, Richard S.
AU - Augustyn, Nicki
AU - French, Cynthia T.
AU - Rice, Jean
AU - Tedeschi, Victoria
AU - Welch, Stephen J.
AU - ,
Y1 - 2013/01/01
N1 - 10.1378/chest.12-2762
JO - CHEST Journal
SP - 1
EP - 4
VL - 143
IS - 1
N2 -
As the title implies, the content of this editorial comprises an eclectic collection of newsworthy items. Because scientific misconduct is arguably “the single most potent threat to science’s prestige”1 and because we have come to appreciate that it is often not intuitively obvious to investigators when they perpetrate it,2 we begin our announcements by discussing two types of scientific misconduct that are not generally well recognized. Both are examples of misrepresentation3 of research or the reporting of research, and both involve investigators as well as editors.
SN - 0012-3692
M3 - doi: 10.1378/chest.12-2762
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1378/chest.12-2762
ER -

Notice the line that starts JO. It says CHEST Journal which is the full name. There is no line for an abbreviation, so somehow, I think Zotero is translating this with a wrong abbreviation.

@DWL-SDCA: You are right about the abbreviation, of course, but CHEST Journal is the formal full name per the journal itself. It's a moderately old journal (started 1935), and the name is slightly different than the first issue when it was "DISEASES of the CHEST" and titles in general were all capitalized.

aurimas · January 18, 2013

Notice the line that starts JO. It says CHEST Journal which is the full name. There is no line for an abbreviation, so somehow, I think Zotero is translating this with a wrong abbreviation.

For what it's worth, if either journal title or journal abbreviation fields are missing from the RIS entry, Zotero uses the same value (whichever is present) for both. In this case it assigns journal title to journal abbreviation. This is not ideal, but often the two are not assigned to correct RIS tags anyway, so we compromise.

DWL-SDCA · January 18, 2013

While I recognize that the journal presents its name in all upper case characters, that is not how it is represented in catalogs or indices. That is not how the journal name would be presented in most citation abbreviation formats. If I were to mention the journal name in a narrative, I'd probably use the upper case form.