Disabling automatic ShortTitle generation

PChemist · November 13, 2023

Is it possible to disable automatic population of the ShortTitle field?

This automatic value is almost never useful. Although some titles do use colon to separate secondary information (I only encountered such cases with some books), most of the time simply dropping the part of the title after colon generates garbage and adds information noise to the record rather than any value.

DWL-SDCA · November 13, 2023

Some styles require the use of shortened titles. Having an editable ShortTitle field will allow you to use this if you must use one of those styles in a future manuscript.

If you are requesting that some of the metadata element types may be optionally hidden from the UI, I have no argument against that.

PChemist · November 14, 2023

I have nothing against those styles. But every time the title has a colon in it, I have to manually go to the ShortTitle field and clear it. This is annoying.

bwiernik · November 14, 2023

I would strongly recommend just letting it be—that is valid data that correctly reflects the short form of the item title should it ever be needed. It doesn’t have any meaningful impact on the size of your database or Zotero performance.

adamsmith · November 14, 2023

But to answer the question -- there's no way to disable it and there's likely not going to be, so if you're in the (highly unusual) situation where you have tons of titles with colons in random locations, you're just out of luck, I'm afraid.