Day automatically included in Date Field

easbyers
I'm not sure if this is the correct forum for this issue, but here it goes.

Recently when I've been adding journal articles using the Chrome Plugin and Zotero Standalone (3.0.14) through JSTOR or any other article database, the day field in for the date seems to be automatically populated with the first of the month when there is no day listed.

For example if a journal came out in October 2010 and is listed as October 2010 in JSTOR, the citation is loaded into my Zotero Database as October 1, 2010. I then have to go back into the citation and delete the "1" because the journal issue didn't come out on the first, it came out in the month of October and leaving the "1" in there would be incorrect.

Is there any way to keep this from happening or is this a new "feature"?
  • adamsmith
    That's not a Zotero feature or change, but happens at JSTOR, which includes the 01 in the (RIS) data they supply. You can ask them if they'll reconsider, but I don't think we'd want to manually remove this on the Zotero side.

    It will also affect you very little, as very few of Zotero's citation styles include the day a journal article was published, so you could consider simply ignoring it.
  • easbyers
    Is this a new(ish) addition to the imported JSTOR data? My journal articles did not used to import with the Day.

    And it does affect me, since I use Chicago, and the Chicago style includes the entire date for all of the journal articles, which means I need to double check all of them to make sure that the day isn't there.
  • adamsmith
    Not very recent - our tests show all JSTOR articles importing with the first of the months for at least half a year back (and we would have never added a day of the month so this would have definitely been in JSTOR data as well).

    I'd be more inclined to consider removing the day from the CMoS citations of journal articles. CMoS is very vague on this:
    "The year, sometimes preceded by an exact date, a month, or a season, appears in parentheses after the volume number (or issue number, if given)."
    But only one of their examples has a specific day in the citation.
  • easbyers
    Good solution. Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    that'll take some time until I get to it, but unless you're in a hurry to submit you can just wait and your citations will auto-update once the new style is up.
  • easbyers
    I can take care of it myself for now. I'm checking all of my citations right now anyway, so it's just as easy to do it manually until it's changed.
  • nickbart
    edited March 17, 2013
    I'd be more inclined to consider removing the day from the CMoS citations of journal articles.
    Well, I beg to differ. I feel the option to include the exact date, including day, should not be removed from style files.

    This would deprive those who want, or need exact dates of any option to do so short of fiddling with style files themselves.

    And besides CMoS actually endorsing exact dates in the text of 14.180 (even if there is only one example), which would be quite enough for me to want to keep this option, I can easily imagine many situations where including the exact date would make perfect sense: Just take the example of journals issued weekly, such as Science, or Nature.

    What needs to be fixed here is rather the data, either by convincing jstor not to include fabricated days, or by encouraging users to remove those bits of a date they do not want in their output.
  • adamsmith
    "option" is the wrong word here though. The style either does or doesn't include exact dates and I don't think CMoS in any way "endorses" exact dates - "sometimes preceded by" doesn't sound like an endorsement to me. Fiddling with data is not an "option" and many sources import with exact dates.

    These are the examples I see in CMoS 14.180, the section that deals with dates explicitly:

    2. David Meban, “Temple Building, Primus Language, and the Proem to Virgil’s Third Georgic,” Classical Philology 103, no. 2 (2008): 153, doi:10.1086/591611.
    18. Jeanette Kennett, “True and Proper Selves: Velleman on Love,” Ethics 118 (January 2008): 215, doi:10.1086/523747.
    23. Boyan Jovanovic and Peter L. Rousseau, “Specific Capital and Technological Variety,” Journal of Human Capital 2 (Summer 2008): 135, doi:10.1086/590066.

    Jovanovic, Boyan, and Peter L. Rousseau. “Specific Capital and Technological Variety.” Journal of Human Capital 2 (Summer 2008): 129–52. doi:10.1086/590066.
    Kennett, Jeanette. “True and Proper Selves: Velleman on Love.” Ethics 118 (January 2008): 213–27. doi:10.1086/523747.
    Meban, David. “Temple Building, Primus Language, and the Proem to Virgil’s Third Georgic.” Classical Philology 103, no. 2 (2008): 150–74. doi:10.1086/591611.

    Where a span of months or seasons is given, use an en dash (e.g., September–December 2010); consecutive months are sometimes indicated by a slash (March/April).

    1. Dean Amadon, “Ecology and the Evolution of Some Hawaiian Birds,” Evolution 1 (March–June 1947): 65–66, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2405404.
    There is not a single one with a full date. There is one full date example later on in a section dealing with citing electronic versions of articles specifically. The Nature/Science issue isn't much of an argument either, as they're both continuously paginated _and_ we include an issue number (which "can never be wrong" according to CMoS). And obviously Science and Nature themselves don't cite full dates for journal articles.

    So to me the question is what the best interpretation of the CMoS is here. From my reading of the manual (and certainly of most texts using the manual) I'd be inclined to say we don't want exact dates.
    Magazine and Newspaper articles would obviously remain with exact dates where available.
  • jeremywiebe
    It appears this was never resolved – full dates are still being included in brackets after the volume and issue number (if present).

    My solution is to insert the linked code into the macro "issued", at line 761: https://gist.github.com/jrwiebe/caeb53b2fabfb78f89ec6ead1a6ed922

    Personally I tend to use only the year, but making the default to supply more information – while not going so far as to include the exact date, which is rarely done in practice for journal articles – seems the right approach.
Sign In or Register to comment.