Handling Conference Acronyms

stefanct
Most academic venues on computer science are better known by their acronym than their full name (e.g., ASPLOS vs. Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems). I would welcome a way to tag and search conference and journal papers by their acronyms.

However, there is no dedicated field for this purpose in Zotero's conference or journal scheme. At import from some sources, the acronym is ending up in the Series field but that's wrong because it's supposed to be used for journal-like publications of selected conference papers (mostly in addition to ordinary proceedings (e.g., Lecture Notes in Computer Science)) etc.

A possible workaround is of course to put that in the extra field, which I exploit already for various other stuff. However, this has several drawbacks, e.g.:
- not possible to limit searches just to the acronyms
- less effective editing
- harder to (not) handle them in exports (e.g., in BBT)

I am mostly familiar with CS venues only but I presume it is not that much different in other fields?
If so it would make sense to add it globally in Zotero IMHO.
  • adamsmith
    if you use journal article (which I think works decently well for CS-type conference proceedings, which behave effectively like periodicals), couldn't you just use journal abbreviation?
  • stefanct
    In theory sure, but that would basically lose the distinction between true journal articles and conference papers. I don't deem that a viable option.
  • bwiernik
    In terms of citation/export, you should store this in Extra as:
    container-title-short: ABBR

    You can also search for this in advanced search using Extra contains “ABBR”.

    Not sure what your editing comment refers to.
  • emilianoeheyns
    Harder to (not) handle them in BBT in what way?
  • stefanct
    edited March 6, 2020
    @bwiernik: Sure I can store it in extra, we could store everything in extra and get rid of all the other fields... ;) More seriously, yes, I know I can use the extra field - I came up with that workaround in my first post. However, that complicates things unnecessarily. Editing the multi-line extra field requires adding the "field name" ("container-title-short" in your example) and keeping any old content of the field in tact (it gets easily crowded there if you use some plugins that make use of the extra field). But it sure is possible... my point is that the (if) abbreviations are so widely used as I think it would make a lot of sense to give them their dedicated field.

    @emilianoeheyns Since BBT exports all extra stuff into bibtex' note field and some/many(?) bibtex styles print the note field verbatim, I am using a BBT script to filter them out in exports (we have discussed that on github some weeks ago).
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited March 6, 2020
    I don't recall. Which issue was that?

    edit: ah, https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex/issues/1423
  • stefanct
    good. if you cant remember, then I have not annoyed you too much yet ;)
  • emilianoeheyns
    No annoyance. Questions on use are always OK.
  • emilianoeheyns
    Come to think of it, this may be a reason to not treat the extra field like a note field.
  • fabbraun
    Is there any update on this topic over the last months?

    I would also be very much interested in this feature!

    I have a few hundred publications in my library of which the conference proceedings have acronyms: e.g. "EMBC 2020" instead of "42nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC)"

    Is there a way to:
    a) store this acronym (besides the extra field)?; and
    b) choose whether to use the acronym or full conference name when citing ?

    If not, is this feature planned to be included in the future?

    Thanks,
    Fab
  • adamsmith
    The Extra field is the current recommended way of storing this as described above. That mode of entry allows for citation styles to distinguish between short and long titles for conferences. It'll also get merged into a proper field when Zotero introduces one.
  • fabbraun
    edited January 29, 2021
    Okay. Is this field planned in a future release of Zotero?

    And is there a way to automatically generate these acronyms?
    E.g. "{XX}nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC)" will always be something like "EMBC 20{XX-YY}"
    Or does this need to be done semi-manually?
    Is there at least a (non-exhaustive) list available which contains such acronyms.

    Thanks a lot for your input
  • adamsmith
    Nothing automatic and no list I'm aware of, no. Zotero has a mechanism to generate journal abbreviations, but those follow a completely different logic, so that won't work here.
  • ldeng-ustc
    I am also annoyed about this.
  • ldeng-ustc
    Any update in the past year?
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