RIS journal titles

talazem
Hello. I have noticed that when exporting RIS out of the Zotero, it places the journal name (publicationTitle) into the field T2. This is a problem when then importing this into other software (such as Papers2), because the journal title then gets placed into the field for Series Titles, and the journal field in Papers2 remains empty.

Some RIS documentation I have seen online seemed to recommend that it be put instead into a field JO; the official documentation now seems to recommend J2 for journal titles. Indeed, when I have manipulated the output file in a text editor, it worked as expected when then imported into Papers2.

Might J2 now be incorporated into the official translator? Many thanks.
  • aurimas
    The RIS documentation (http://www.refman.com/support/risformat_intro.asp) says T2 for journal title, but Zotero can be a bit more forgiving and export journal title in JO and J2 fields to support software that does not follow specification. Though it looks like Papers2 would still import series title.
  • adamsmith
    which official documentation are you referring to?
    A list to the field mapping used by Zotero is here:
    https://github.com/aurimasv/translators/wiki/RIS-Tag-Map
    it is based quite precisely on the official RIS specification available here:
    http://www.refman.com/support/risformat_intro.asp (link to .zip containing Excel table at the bottom of the page).

    It's obviously quite easy to change the default output from T2 to J2, but we'll go with the standard specs unless there is newer/more official documentation.
    I'm pretty sure that mapping T2 to series title is unambiguously wrong, so papers should fix that.
  • talazem
    edited November 26, 2012
    My apologies -- it seems I had mistaken a list on a Wiki page as "official". Looking at the refman list, you are correct: T2 is for journal full title (as well as series titles for edited books, etc.), while J2 seems to be for the short name of the journal. Bookends correctly imports both T2 and J2 into the Journal title, while Papers2 seems not to distinguish between the entry types (Journal, Book, Edited Book, etc.) and just maps it to the "Subtitle" field. I'll raise that with them. Many thanks for your help.
  • hubtero
    edited July 15, 2013
    The old version of the RIS specification did indeed specify that "JO" should be used for the journal title (http://www.refman.com/support/risformat_tags_05.asp); "T2" was used for a secondary article title (http://www.refman.com/support/risformat_tags_01.asp).

    It may be that using "T2" for the journal title in the new version of the specification is a mistake.
  • adamsmith
    I doubt this is a mistake, not least because that's what Endnote - together with many other sites & software is doing. Papers is (was? I don't know if this is still the case) the exception here. The old specs were rather shoddy and incomplete, the new ones appear to have been done with a lot more care.

    Note that Zotero does recognize JO as an alternative on import to be able to handle RIS created from the old specs to some degree at least, but we won't change the export behavior.
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