Year info not taken while importing reference from pubmed

rmjohn · December 19, 2008

Hi,
I was saving a number of references from pubmed and I noticed that for some of the references, zotero has not captured the Year info and for some it has also not captured teh Journal info even though both exist in the actual pubmed citation. Any ideas?

dstillman · December 19, 2008

Can you provide examples?

rmjohn · December 19, 2008

Yes. Search (("pakistan"[Title/Abstract]) AND ("tobacco"[Title/Abstract])) AND (pakistan tobacco) in pubmed and you will get 62 references. Out of this there will be a couple of them which wont display years.

Rintze · December 19, 2008

Some of these papers use a different XML structure to store the date when the paper was published. All three failing papers on the first results page (e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17244976) use the following structure:

<PubDate>
<MedlineDate>2007 Jan-Mar</MedlineDate>
</PubDate>

whereas the translator only accepts

<PubDate>
<Year>2008</Year>
</PubDate>

which is used for most papers.

P.S. This behavior is also documented:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/licensee/elements_descriptions.html#pubdate

rmjohn · December 19, 2008

Thanks. Interesting observation. An ignorant question. Cant the translator be modified to accept different kinds of structures?

Rintze · December 20, 2008

Normally, yes. I'm just not certain how easily Zotero can parse the contents of these MedlineDate-elements, which always seem to specify a date-range.

Rintze · December 22, 2008

Another patch for the NCBI Pubmed translator, this time to read the contents of PubDate.MedlineDate when available:

http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-dev/web/NCBI PubMed date.patch