Incorrect Journal Title: Journal of Neuroscience

One of the most influential and cited journals in the field of Neuroscience (Journal of Neuroscience) is still being referenced incorrectly by Zotero. It should be 'Journal of Neuroscience' in the reference list not 'The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience'. Yes I could go through and manually change the 100+ citations in my reference manager, but maybe this could be fixed for future imports from pubmed?
Thanks
  • Also: There should not be a 'The' in front of 'European Journal of Neuroscience'
  • Where are you importing these articles from?
  • edited December 3, 2018
    @popwatson PubMed/NLM's own catalogue calls J Neurosci, "The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience."

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog?term="J+Neurosci"[Title+Abbreviation]

    This is quite annoying to me, too, as I heavily cite J Neurosci, but Zotero is saving for you what is offered by Pubmed. Not Zotero's fault, and definitely not something "incorrect".

    Also, look at the J Neurosci webpage: They have their name in their logo as "The Journal of Neuroscience", not Journal of Neuroscience. Again, the article "The" in EJN's name is also coming from PubMed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/?term="eur+j+neurosci"[Title+Abbreviation]

    Same with the other journal "Addiction" you mention in another thread. It is not uncommon in PubMed/NLM for journal to get a location tag in their names. It can be even desirable sometimes. e.g., There are two journals named "Biochemistry": one from Washington D.C., one from Moscow.
  • See:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/74882/incorrect-journal-title-addiction#latest

    Concerning "The..." : Some journal publishers vigorously insist (demand by nasty letters from attorneys) that the titles of their journals begin with the word "The". Most indexes of journals will list these journals as "Journal of Neuroscience, The" but maintain the official title with the preceding article. Because journal title abbreviations are made through any of several standard processes "The" is _never_ included in an abbreviation.

    If you submit a manuscript and use abbreviations without the place or year (when these are needed); "nice" publishers will fix this during copy editing but many will return your manuscript with a scolding note to revise appropriately.
  • Concerning, "The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience." That was the official name of the journal when they applied for and received their ISSN. There are literally hundreds of examples where the official (long) name is rarely used. Indeed, sometimes the official title includes reference to an organization that no longer exists. While in some nations (like the USA) it is trivial to quickly obtain an ISSN in most places it is much more difficult and time consuming to make any change to the original name without also changing the ISSN. Thus, titles that include an associated organization will linger.
  • edited December 4, 2018
    Hmmm well that's annoying because I never see the overly-long name used in APA style referencing (APA requires full names of journals, not abbreviations) and so I'm manually having to change all of these references which is not ideal. But I appreciate that this is a pubmed issue (not a zotero issue) . I should mention that if I import a reference direct from the JNeuroscience website then the publication name is simply 'Journal of Neuroscience'. So I guess I'll just do that in the future (even though I've had problems in the past with incorrect year/issue/vol coming in from journal websites). Thanks for your help in this.
  • Yes, the journal webpage will almost always give you the best data.
  • edited December 4, 2018
    I disagree -- PubMed has great data, better than most publishers (including, e.g. PMID and PMCID, standardized keywords, and titles in sentence case) and we should get imports from there right. I'll look into this.

    Edit: though I'll not be able to remove the "The" -- that's a very tricky issue as DWL points out.
  • edited December 5, 2018
    Ok well it would be great if publication names could be imported from pubmed without all the extraneous words so that the APA style reference list is generated correctly. Another one for you - 'Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology' is imported as 'Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)'.

    *Sorry yes I was meaning the QJEP (not JEP variants) and edited to now make this clearer!
  • edited December 5, 2018
    @popwatson

    The Journal of experimental psychology---

    You picked a good example for the question of journals with extended names:

    There is not a current journal with that exact official name. The journal with that name ended in 1974. In 1975 the journal began a series of splits into several different titles and then recently further split into several more. These are:

    Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
    Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
    Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
    Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition
    Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

    These are published by the American Psychological Association.

    The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology is a different journal (currently published by Taylor and Francis Group and earlier by Sage). The reason that it is named "Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)" is because this journal was originally published under the title Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology during the years 1948 - 1980. In 1981, the journal split into two publications: "The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human experimental psychology" and "The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section B: comparative and physiological psychology". In 2006, the two journals merged to form The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006). This is the current official journal name. Alas, the QJEP is colloquially known in the UK and much of Europe as "Journal of experimental psychology' or simply as "Experimental psychology". The NLM recently acknowledged these informal names by adding them as "other titles".

    (edited to provide the full names of journal sections A & B.)

    (2nd edit: Further complicating this naming mess is the existance of a journal published by Hoegrefe & Huber since 2002 with the title "Experimental psychology". This now English language journal continues the well-respected German language journal, Zeitschrift für experimentelle Psychologie, that changed its language in 2001. The German language version of this journal began in 1953 by the same publisher. )



  • edited December 5, 2018
    In my opinion we can definitely remove the parentheses on import. I'm never seeing those in citations.

    The subtitles are trickier because there are a fair number of journals (to wits the different Journal of Experimental Psychology) where those are crucial information and leaving them out would break citations. For a lot of society journals, on the other hand, the subtitles are useless and would be better to remove. I'm not sure we can distinguish between the two.

    We're not going to muck around with articles (which are part of the journal's actual name and don't hurt in citation) or commonly used alternate names. FWIW, I think citing the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology as "Journal of Experimental Psychology" is citational malpractice. If I search for "Journal of Experimental Psychology" I find a different journal. The whole point of citations is to be a clear direction to find the work in question.
  • edited December 5, 2018
    Another example of unfortunate journal names that included organization names is "Injury prevention: journal of the International Society for Child and Adolescent Injury Prevention". The ISCAIP organization only lasted a very few years. But the memory of the organization lives on as the official journal name in multiple bibliographic databases even though this BMJ Group journal dropped the organization from its title and masthead more than a decade ago. Articles from this journal (surely the most cited public health safety-related publication) haven't been cited using the full (organization) title for many years. Over the past few days, I have unsuccessfully tried to find examples in APA style reference lists of any full title examples that don't exclude the supporting organization. I wonder if the titles are shortened before submission or during the publisher copy editing process.

    It would be nice if the organizational part of the titles could be dropped from the Zotero records. As I said in a different thread this occasionally shortened title was accomplished in my database by ignoring the PubMed journal title and on import referencing a hand-edited title standard table keyed to the journal ISSN. The number of "official" too-long titles that require truncation is not terribly large.
  • edited December 5, 2018
    @adamsmith Would a good heuristic be dropping the post-colon part if it starts with “journal of the” or “official journal of the” and not otherwise?

    That won’t get all of the useles subtitles (like my society’s journal: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog?cmd=historysearch&querykey=1), but it would get most without any risk of losing important information I don’t think.
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