Abbreviated journal titles for AMA 10 style

The container title has the form "short" in the Visual Editor, but on generating the bibliography by right-clicking the library in Zotero, journal titles are not abbreviated. In the Visual Editor, the title of a built-in example is abbreviated but not of a journal reference that I uploaded to the Visual Editor.

A similar problem was reported in 2018 (https://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/issues/3269), but that appears to have been fixed.

Any idea as to what could be going wrong?

Thanks!
  • Abbreviations are only automated when you use the word processor add-on. Otherwise they rely on the journal abbr. field of the item
  • OK. That solves one mystery.

    And how is the journal abbr. field of the item populated? Is there a way to get this into Zotero automatically?
  • I've found the answer (I think!) here:

    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/67047/answered-zotero-and-journals-abbreviations

    It looks as though there's no foolproof way to automatically populate the journal abbr. field. It all depends on the source. If anyone knows of a reliable database that will do this for most medical journals, please let me know.

    Thank you, @adamsmith, for the quick reply to my original question.

    By the way, I asked ChatGPT this, and it said (among other things) that Zotero has a built-in tool for searching and adding journal abbreviations. When I asked what this tool is called, it answered: "The built-in tool used to search for journal abbreviations in Zotero is called "Abbreviation Index". It can be accessed by clicking on the "Tools" menu and selecting "Abbreviation Index".

  • Yeah, ChatGPT will just make up stuff and sound confident about it...
    PubMed would be your reliable source. That would always get you journal abbreviations
  • :-)

    Thanks! I'll try PubMed.
  • edited January 28, 2023
    For journals not in PubMed visit the ISSN LTEA:

    https://www.issn.org/services/online-services/access-to-the-ltwa/

    Scroll down and you will find a text entry field.
  • A follow-up question. When using the Zotero Word add-in, when it does not find a journal abbreviation in MEDLINE, does it fall back on LTWA? I remember reading this somewhere. I tested this with an ACS-style paper in the Journal of Chemical Education that is unlikely to be in MEDLINE, and the add-in inserted the correct abbreviated title.

    Thanks!
  • In the absence of the entire journal title, it applies ISO style abbreviation conventions (on which MEDLINE abbreviations are based)
  • Thanks for clarifying this.
  • edited February 18, 2023
    Just to be sure that I'm not missing something...

    My understanding is that Zotero inserts abbreviations into citations and does not add abbreviations to the Zotero record itself, yes? Is there some utility or plug-in that I've missed? I'd like a pointer to the code Zotero uses to convert title words to LTWA abbreviations. I do this by hand-editing my Zotero records and I'm frequently surprised that some multi-syllable words are not LTWA - abbreviated when it seems that they could be.

    I'd love it if Zotero would actually ignore the publisher-supplied abbreviation and convert journal titles to Medline or LTWA standards. (I've commented on other threads of this forum about the truly bizarre "abbreviations" that some publishers provide with their metadata.)

    One more pedantry thing ...

    In correspondence with the NLM help desk about another topic, I was corrected by the support person to no longer call the abbreviations "Medline" but to instead use "PubMed abbreviation" or "NLM abbreviation". We were discussing their objection to my use of the words "PubMed indexed journals" and the support people stressed that only the Medline journal articles are indexed and the non-Medline articles included in PubMed are not "indexed" but listed. They stressed that only when articles are assigned MeSH terms are they considered indexed. They offered that many letters-to-the-editor and editorials in Medline journals are not assigned MeSH terms and thus are not "indexed".

    edit: Is there any consideration for also accommodating other serial abbreviation conventions such as BlueBook? See:
    https://personal.psu.edu/dhk3/research/Bluebook/T-13.htm

    It would be nice to be able to choose which abbreviation standard or even better to be able to automatically convert from one to another.

  • My understanding is that Zotero inserts abbreviations into citations and does not add abbreviations to the Zotero record itself, yes?
    Correct. But obviously importing from PubMed gets you the right abbrevation into journalAbbr.

    The code is here: https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/master/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/cite.js#L429
    The abbreviations.json file here: https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/master/resource/schema/abbreviations.json

    If you have some funds, you can talk to Emiliano, who has built both an add-on to fetch PMIDs from Pubmed and the ability to use Zotero's automated abbreviations into BetterBibTeX -- using either of those strategies, he'd be able to build you an add-on that populates the journal abbreviation field with relative ease.

    From the CSL end, we've always had replaceable journal abbreviations in mind -- Bluebook (as well as other anglo-saxon law styles like McGill, OSCOLA, or AGLC) and SBL are examples of styles that aren't served by the current abbreviations model at all and I believe even the CAS abbreviations have some minor differences.
    It's technically actually possible to replace Zotero's abbreviations.json file with a custom version, but that's obviously not end-user friendly behavior.
    citeproc-js is all set up for this, so the missing features are really just the alternate abbreviation lists and a usable GUI implementation or and add-on.
  • I already hired Emiliano to develop a substantially-modified MODS export that better matches my SafetyLit database import parser. (Among other things, he eliminated the publisher-provided journal abbreviations and introduced some logic to handle proper ahead-of-print metadata.) I can testify that he can do great work. Emile, if you are reading this, thanks again.
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