Stripping author middle name periods when adding to library?

k2smith
I am trying to transition to Zotero, and so am adding a lot of PDFs and pulling many citations through Zotero Connector. However, I'm running into a problem that author middle initial punctuation is pulled in an inconsistent way -- sometimes as "Smith, Alan B." and sometimes as "Smith, Alan B" -- which leads Zotero to believe that these are two different authors, and causes problems when I try to export to a BibTeX library.

Is there any way to force consistency in the way that Zotero treats punctuation after middle names (e.g., stripping out all of the periods)? A setting in the connector or a post-hoc run through a database would be fine, but I don't want to have to go through hundreds of citations and check each of them individually.
  • bwiernik
    Generally, leaving the periods in is preferred. (And give full author names, rather than initials at all.)

    Can you confirm that Zotero treats the authors differently with just the difference in period and not also a difference in a middle initial, full vs initialized name, etc.? I don’t think that should be the case.
  • k2smith
    After a good amount of exploration, it seems like Zotero stores these names separately, but figures out they are the same when putting together bibliographies, etc.

    If I try to add an author to a paper starting with "smi" it will give me two options to autocomplete -- one with the period and one without. And when exporting to BibTeX it will export citations with or without periods depending on how they are stored. However, when creating a bibliography or using the citation insertion in Google Docs, it does appropriately treat both authors as the same A.B. Smith.

    This has become less of an issue for me now since part of the problem was with the LaTeX package I was using treating both differently (which has now been resolved), but for database cleanliness it would be nice to know if there is a simple way of keeping this formatting consistent (either with or without periods) across my collection.
  • bwiernik
    You could potentially use the JavaScript API to clean that up, but I would honestly just say not to worry about it. If it generates the same citation output, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s stored in different ways.
    https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/client_coding/javascript_api
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