Sciencedirect and date issue

ephienix
Each time Zotero retrieves references from Sciencedirect, the "Date" field also contains the month of the publication ("October 2008"). This is very annoying given that I have to manually correct all citations in my library. Is there any possibility for the translator to strip all non-numeric characters so that only the year would remain? Or, in case some journals use a more complicated "Date" information pattern, retrieve the 4 leftmost characters?
thanks
  • RintzeRintze
    Why exactly do you want to have the month of publication removed? The Zotero output styles are smart enough to only grab the information they need (in most cases just the year) when generating bibliographic entries, so I was wondering why you find this additional bit of information problematic.
  • ephienix
    I thought that since the "date" field in the zotero editor includes the month, that would be the case with the bibliographic and in-text entry so i deleted the month by hand in Zotero before I inserted the citation.
    But then I thought "ok, the zotero styles are clever enough. But what if I want to export my library in .bib? Will the date will still include the month?" To be surprise, the month and the year are stored in two different fields so everything's cool!
    That's a lot for your feedback, question answered :-)
  • DWL-SDCA
    When I do a MODS export of records that I accepted from ScienceDirect, the month and year are in the same field. I will NEVER want this. Is there a safe way for me to alter the MODS export format so that it will only export the year? My preference would be to have a built-in option to eliminate the month from being stored in my database. The different publishers that provide more than the year all seem to use different full-date formats so this day-month-year information still needs to be edited for each record. (I don't want any alteration to the date-accessed information for website citations.)
  • noksagt
    My preference would be to have a built-in option to eliminate the month from being stored in my database. The different publishers that provide more than the year all seem to use different full-date formats so this day-month-year information still needs to be edited for each record.
    I don't think that is an insurmountable problem. If the dates were stored/presented in a standard format, like w3cdtf, what disadvantage would the extra information have? In MODS, you can even specify the date/time standard used.
  • DWL-SDCA
    "In MODS, you can even specify the date/time standard used. "

    Are you saying that I can alter how the date field is exported in MODS format? I have scanned the Zotero documentation and searched the forums. I don't see how to do it. The date seems to be stored as month-date in a single Zotero field.

    Thanks beforehand.
  • dstillman
    You can alter the MODS translator to output only the year, but it looks like we should just add encoding="w3cdtf" and output the date in YYYY-MM-DD format.
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