Pubmed imports: Journal abbreviations

sschoelch
Hi everyone,
I have noticed that some of the Pubmed imports have the "journal abbreviation" field filled in whereas some other imports leave it blank. When the there is an abbreviation, it has periods after each abbreviated word except the last one.

No when I cite the library entries that do not have a journal abbreviation imported, Zotero correctly abbreviates the journals in the bibliography and does not add periods to the abbreviated words (as it should be, at least for the journal I'm currently writing for); the library entries with abbreviation however are cited with the dots. I could not find a way to change the CLS file in a way so that it does not use the periods anymore, so I had to manually delete all the periods from the journal abbreviation fields of all entries...which was kind of annoying. Is there any way to work around this problem? Or to at least standardize the import process so that all entries either have or have not the journal abbreviation field filled in (preferably without periods...)?

Thanks for your help,
Seb

PS: Otherwise, awesome piece of software, saved me many many hours and lots of money :)
  • adamsmith
    only some styles use Journal abbreviations. You can direct the CSL to always use the journals long title (most styles in the humanities and social sciences do that - cf. Chicago, ASA, APSA). Presumably the style(s) you are using try to use the abbreviation and only use the whole journal title when they can't find an abbreviation.

    No way to change the import feature, I think Pubmed is not the most consistent of all databases.
    There will be an option to use or don't use periods in Journal Abbreviations in the future.
  • noksagt
    edited August 14, 2009
    When the there is an abbreviation, it has periods after each abbreviated word except the last one.
    Example link? It should import with all periods that are present, assuming that the underlying data from PubMed is good.
    No when I cite the library entries that do not have a journal abbreviation imported, Zotero correctly abbreviates the journals in the bibliography and does not add periods to the abbreviated words
    Presumably, this is only because you have made such an abbreviation manually. Zotero does not have an automated abbreviation mechanism yet.
    the library entries with abbreviation however are cited with the dots.
    Because this is how they are stored in the database. For now, you will have to continue to edit those entries manually. Medium-term, it will be good to store abbreviations with dots: the new CSL processor will be able to remove them (the processor in Zotero can't do that yet). I don't think there would be any way for it to know what to add dots to, so better to provide that info in the database.
  • bjorn
    Hi,
    is there any journal abbreviator or "dotifier" on the horizon? Journals from American Society for Microbiology require dots after each abbreviated word in the journal title. This is solved in EN by the use of "termlists".
  • adamsmith
    yeah - Endnote is quite a bit ahead on that - people are thinking about this, but I haven't seen much in terms of specific actions.
    There are also copyright concerns for the lists etc.
Sign In or Register to comment.