Upgrade Storagemistakes in citation reference systems
Painfully learning Zotero.
To my horror, some of the citation management systems in university library databases (which can be "imported" into Zotero/i.e., be a source) have errors in them....even spelling mistakes but also internal variations from work to work such as "2nd ed." and "2nd Edition". Yes, I gather that the people hired to create the items may have made mistakes or were entirely different people (dozens? hundreds?) in entirely different countries, different years, and with different supervisors, etc. Could you say which citation management systems YOU have found to be the most accurate? I am doing an academic ms, and my publisher will return my ms if details at that level are not impeccable in their specified choice of APA 7th edition.
To my horror, some of the citation management systems in university library databases (which can be "imported" into Zotero/i.e., be a source) have errors in them....even spelling mistakes but also internal variations from work to work such as "2nd ed." and "2nd Edition". Yes, I gather that the people hired to create the items may have made mistakes or were entirely different people (dozens? hundreds?) in entirely different countries, different years, and with different supervisors, etc. Could you say which citation management systems YOU have found to be the most accurate? I am doing an academic ms, and my publisher will return my ms if details at that level are not impeccable in their specified choice of APA 7th edition.
This has nothing to do with the output citation style. Zotero will generate correct APA 7th as long as the data is entered correctly in your library, including with titles stored in sentence case.
For "2nd ed." and "2nd Edition", just change it to "2" and Zotero should generate an appropriate citation from that for your selected citation style either way. (Zotero could potentially do more to try to detect and normalize those — I'm not actually sure why we don't.)
After that, data directly from journal publishers or imported via DOI tends to be pretty good.
Worldcat, google scholar, and amazon (while useful given their coverage) are all much less accurate.
Commercial full-text databases such as EBSCO, ProQuest, etc. differ greatly in the quality, consistency, and completeness of the metadata they provide -- especially across the various sub-databases within the companies' offerings.
Some commercial databases intentionally build errors (Mountweazels) into their records. Sometimes this is as simple as changing, adding, or omitting words in the title of a journal article or chapter title. Sometimes this will be differences between the true pagination and the database version of the ending page number.
Using a tool such as Zotero to assist with collecting item metadata and using your Zotero records to insert well-formed citations is a luxury*. However, it is your responsibility to be certain that the metadata provided by a database or publisher is accurate. This can mean that you will frequently need to edit your records in the Zotero library to match the printed or PDF version of the items you read. [I hope that you do fully read everything you cite. There are often citation errors in published works.]
*When I was writing research papers in college in the early 1970s I went to the library with a stack of index cards and used a book that was a printed index to find literature. There was no such thing as a Boolean, multi-term search. I copied potential sources onto cards and (if I copied accurately and if the journal was in the library's collection) went to the stacks and read the article. I took notes on the card and verified the accuracy and completeness of the metadata. When writing the paper all citations needed to be typed and formatted by hand using a typewriter.