How to homogenize references

idilsezer · May 27, 2021

Hi,

The references added at the end of the manuscript are not looking good.

- Some citations have their journals' name abbreviated while others aren't abbreviated.
- Titles are in lowercase or with uppercases depending on the cited article.

How can I homogenize citations?? I have 14 pages of citations I hope I don't have to do it manually...

Thank you in advance for your help!

DWL-SDCA · May 27, 2021

Within your Zotero library, all titles should be in "sentence case" -- that is, English language titles having only the first word and proper nouns beginning with an upper case letter. There is a right-click option to help with that but you will need to edit the proper nouns yourself. The Zotero styles will handle the casing of titles when you begin with sentence-case titles in your database.

There is also a right-click utility to make journal names sentence case.

DWL-SDCA · May 27, 2021

For abbreviations, see:

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/journal_abbreviations

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/journal_abbreviations
scroll to Editing Items-Journal Abbreviations

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/item_types_and_fields
scroll down to Fields for Books and Periodicals -- Journal Abbr

If you will accept the automated ISO/Medline abbreviations Zotero will mostly automate the process. If you need some other abbreviation standard you will need to enter that abbreviation yourself or accept what is in the journal metadata. Note that (too many) journal publishers provide downright weird strings that require squinting to be interpreted as a real journal abbreviation. You will need to edit those yourself or delete the weird abbreviation entirely and let Zotero's automatic ISOafication process set the abbreviation. (Medline-type abbreviations are largely without periods while ISO abbreviations have periods.) It is best practice to enter abbreviations with periods because Zotero can automatically remove them when appropriate.