Formatting of arXiv citations in Word

I'm in the process of migrating from Papers to Zotero (i.e. still climbing the learning curve) and came across what I think might be a bug or issue of some sort in the Word plug-in. I'm setting up a bibliography that includes a citation to an arXiv preprint, and while the format of the bibliography looks correct in the Style Preview inside Zotero, it has some errors when transferred over to Word.

The style file is the Science template. Inside Zotero, it looks like this:

1.
J. Guo, G. Sun, B. Zhao, L. Wang, W. Hong, V. A. Sidorov, N. Ma, Q. Wu, S. Li, Z. Y. Meng, A. W. Sandvik, L. Sun, Quantum phases of SrCu2(BO3)2 from high-pressure thermodynamics. arXiv:1904.09927 [cond-mat] (2019) (available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09927).

Whereas in Word it looks like this:
1. J. Guo, G. Sun, B. Zhao, L. Wang, W. Hong, V. A. Sidorov, N. Ma, Q. Wu, S. Li, Z. Y. Meng, A. W. Sandvik, L. Sun, Quantum phases of SrCu2(BO3)2 from high-pressure thermodynamics. ArXiv190409927 Cond-Mat (2019) (available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09927).

Notice that the colon after arxiv is missing, as are the dot separating the month/year from article number and the brackets around cond-mat. It's not a particularly big deal in and of itself, especially since the URL is correct, but it is a bit worrisome to note that the plug-in might be munging data because I then have to wonder what else might be silently wrong...

Zotero 5.0.77, Word 16.30, both on a Mac running OS 10.15.

Any suggestions/hints/etc. greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Daniel
  • Someone else might have an idea what's going on, but it's correct for me in Word with the same setup:

    1. J. Guo, G. Sun, B. Zhao, L. Wang, W. Hong, V. A. Sidorov, N. Ma, Q. Wu, S. Li, Z. Y. Meng, A. W. Sandvik, L. Sun, Quantum phases of SrCu2(BO3)2 from high-pressure thermodynamics. arXiv:1904.09927 [cond-mat] (2019) (available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09927).
  • Interesting. I wonder whether it could be a Word issue then, some sort of auto-correct "helping" to "fix" the formatting. Usually Word has some squiggly underlining to mark things it changed like that, but maybe that doesn't apply to text pasted in via field codes. I'll have to play around with the Word document settings and see if that's the cause.
  • Does this happen when you cite the item in a new empty document? If not, I suspect the issue is that the citation is to an orphaned item in your document (e.g., one you deleted from your library)
  • Yes, once I saw the issue I tried it with a blank document and just a single test citation; behavior was the same. Also, turning off all of Word's autocorrect features didn't change the behavior, and a couple of different preprints in my library imported to Word with the same issues.
  • What's the item type in Zotero? I'm wondering if this could be automated journal abbreviations gone amuck
  • Item type is "Journal Article". As I understand it, that's the preferred type for arxiv preprints, and in any event that's what was generated when I imported the article into Zotero via the Firefox plugin.

    Just to test that there wasn't something weird with the library entry for that particular preprint, I replicated the workflow with a random preprint just now:
    1) Navigate to arxiv page in Firefox, click the Zotero import button. Imports as a journal article, with publisher "arXiv:1911.02139 [cond-mat]"
    2) In blank Word file, click "Add citation" and select that new preprint
    3) Click "Add bibliography".

    Result still shows the issue:
    test(1)
    1. J. Lu, Analysis of magnetization induced error field in superconducting magnets. ArXiv191102139 Cond-Mat (2019) (available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02139).
  • Haven't checked yet if I can replicate that, but I'd guess that's what's going on - journals for "Science" are abbreviated and Zotero tries to force an automated abbreviation algorithm on the arXiv paper with, uhm, undesirable results.
  • Yes, it only happens with "Use MEDLINE journal abbreviations" turned on in the document preferences.
  • I can take a look at the Science style this weekend and come up with a solution
  • But is there really a solution as long as we keep arxiv as journal article (which I'm still feeling a bit uneasy about anyway but we did because of user requests)? I guess one more case to quickly move towards having proper preprints support in Zotero & CSL
  • That was basically my plan—to figure out what to do with it and whether to leave it as journal article or something else like `article`. I don't think it should stay in its current input format (e.g., it might work for physics and math journals, but it isn't going to work well for psychology journals at present, because the collection and ID don't really go to the correct place).
  • Thanks folks for the help. I can confirm that deselecting the "Use MedLine journal abbreviations" fixes the issue (having that checkbox available inside the style previewer might be a useful thing to add), though of course it does mean either living with the full journal names or manually going through and adding abbreviation fields to all of the papers in a bibliography.

    I obviously don't know anything about the software internals, but from this one end-user's perspective (with primarily physics articles), having a preprint item type makes more sense than calling it a "journal article" and the idea that the article number should be saved as part of the publication name is very counter-intuitive and was one of the things that required a lot of manual clean-up when I migrated my library over from Papers (which does have a "preprint" item type and an article-number field).
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