Shorten URLs

mcintire
Wouldn't it me great if ZOTERO could automatically make use of Bit.ly and shorten long URLs?
Is there anyway to program Zotero to do that?
Yosi
  • adamsmith
    shorten URLs where? To save them? Most journals and styleguides would frown on that.
  • mcintire
    Shorten them in the citation and bibliography. Why would anyone frown on that?
  • adamsmith
    because full URLs tell the reader--even if she doesn't click them--the website an item comes from.
  • mcintire
    Frequently I manually change the URL to bit.ly format. It often makes the citation much more manageable. No one had ever complained . . . But it is an extra step and takes a little effort on my part.

    I would argue that it doesn't make any difference where the document is stored. Often the URL is a secondary repository of a document. The important thing, surely, is to provide the reader with Internet access to the document when possible.
  • fbennett
    Third-party URL shorteners also add a further layer of link-rot risk, which is a problem for literature that needs to be accessible over the long term - if the shortening service goes away, there is no way to look up the resource in the Web Archive or elsewhere.

    The library at Harvard is leading an initiative for stable URLs (perma.cc) in legal publishing. Another really interesting recent move is the PLOS Rich Citation project.

    It looks as though URLs for use in academic publishing are on the verge of undergoing a process of formalization, to give them a level of reliability closer to that of human-readable citations themselves.
  • adamsmith
    The important thing, surely, is to provide the reader with
    Internet access to the document when possible.
    That's really not Zotero's decision to make, though. As long as link-shorteners aren't commonly recommended or even accepted in e.g. APA, Chicago Manual, IEEE, NLM etc. I don't think Zotero should go that way.

    Btw., though, if providing access is the only purpose of a citation, we don't need any formatted citations at all, we could just used URLs/DOIs/ISBNs. There are people who argue that's the way it should be, but as long as you're doing real bibliographies, the information displayed--not just where it links to--does matter.
  • adamsmith
    yeah, what fbennett says, too. If there's going to be an accepted solution, it will likely be one of those.
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