Journal Abbr field

ryofurue
I'm not sure how to phrase my question because I don't fully understand the situation I'm in.

When I import bib information from a journal website via the Zotero browser plugin, the entry gets both "Publication" and "Journal Abbr" on Zotero.

1) Is the "Journal Abbr" provided by the website (publisher) or derived by the Zotero plugin ?

2) Is the abbreviation likely to be unique? I wonder whether I'm getting different abbreviations for the same journal.

3) All these abbreviations seem to be period-free. For example, I see something like "J Climate Sci" instead of "J. Climate Sci." Is this standard, de-facto standard, widely-observed convention, or . . . ?

I'm asking these questions because I want to decide whether I want to erase the Journal Abbr provided when the entry is imported and rely on Zotero's mechanism of abbreviating the journal names.
  • northword
    edited 11 days ago
    > Is the "Journal Abbr" provided by the website (publisher) or derived by the Zotero plugin ?

    When importing items from a website, the journal abbreviation field is provided by the web page.

    When certain plugins are installed, the plugin may modify this field.

    > Is the abbreviation likely to be unique?

    The abbreviations obtained from web pages are not unique because different web sources provide different abbreviations (for example, Web of Science uses all caps without periods).


    > All these abbreviations seem to be period-free.

    This is provided by your journal's website, but it is recommended to use the one with dots in Zotero.

    ---

    Linter (https://github.com/northword/zotero-format-metadata) can batch modify some journal abbreviations, its data source is https://github.com/JabRef/abbrv.jabref.org，following ISO4 standard with dots (https://github.com/northword/zotero-format-metadata/blob/main/docs/features.md#require-iso4-abbreviation-require-journal-abbr).
  • ryofurue
    @northword Thank you very much for your clear answers.

    Those answers together imply that there are no practical benefits in retaining the publisher-supplied abbreviations and they are potential sources of practical nuisance (inconsistent journal names in your reference list).

    > When certain plugins are installed, the plugin may modify this field.

    I just use the official Zotero plugin for Chrome. Nothing else.

    Regarding that, I was wondering if it's possible to prevent the plugin from importing Journal Abbr even when the publisher provides it. I looked at the plugin's options page and also the "details" page under "options" but didn't find a setting for the purpose.
  • adamsmith
    No, there's no way to prevent importing them, but they also have virtually no cost. Either you use a citation style that doesn't use abbreviations at all, or you use a citation style where Zotero automates the abbreviations from the journal title -- only if you have a style that uses abbreviations _and_ you disable Zotero's automatically generating them in the word processor add-on will the field even be used and then it seems useful to at least have the basics there.
  • ryofurue
    Ah, thanks, that comment of yours has pointed me to the real issue: I use the Better BibTeX extension of Zotero and that plugin has only a switch "Automatically abbreviate journal title if none is set explicitly". I want automatic abbreviation but the explicit Journal Abbr field is preventing that. Therefore I must erase the field manually.

    . . . So, the real solution is to ask the author of the Better BibTeX extension to provide a switch "Automatically abbreviate journal title ignoring the Journal Abbr field."

    *footnote: You talk about "styles", but LaTeX styles don't abbreviate journal titles. It's not impossible to program LaTeX to do the abbreviation referring to a database, but no such mechanism is provided. For this reason, the Better BibTeX extension provides the capability of automatic abbreviation when exporting Zotero database to the LaTeX-compatible database format.
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