Upgrade StorageWoS/WoK and added hyphens in article titles
This maybe isn't the best category for this comment but here goes:
I've been puzzled for years about a practice in Web of Science / Knowledge where the editors add extraneous hyphens to the titles of journal articles. For example, "United States" or "Northern Ireland" often are listed as "United-States" or "Northern-Ireland". "Suicide prevention" becomes suicide-prevention. There is also a tendency for (linguistic) articles to be dropped or substituted. "a" sometimes becomes "the" and vice-versa. The punctuation mark ":" often is changed to ";" or to a hyphen. Words or phrases are placed within quotation marks where none were in the title of the published article. The same article in PubMed or PsycINFO has the correct title. Even worse, the ending page number is wrong or omitted almost 5 percent of the time for older articles and only somewhat less frequently for more recent ones. Another problem I've found is that some American English words are changed to British English spellings and vice-versa.
I've convinced my students to use a bibliographic utility such as Zotero [this year more are using Zotero than any of the commercial products] but now systematic errors are being introduced into the reference lists of their papers.
I know that the title changes are introduced at entry because I receive the same electronic feeds of xml data from publishers and the titles in the files are the same as the titles of the published article. Does anyone know why this database provider seems to intentionally insert errors? My questions to Thompson-ISI aren't answered. The errors are not from my import process -- the errors are on the WoS webpages (http://apps.isiknowledge.com.libproxy....). I import WoS-based citations into Zotero via BibTeX.
I've been puzzled for years about a practice in Web of Science / Knowledge where the editors add extraneous hyphens to the titles of journal articles. For example, "United States" or "Northern Ireland" often are listed as "United-States" or "Northern-Ireland". "Suicide prevention" becomes suicide-prevention. There is also a tendency for (linguistic) articles to be dropped or substituted. "a" sometimes becomes "the" and vice-versa. The punctuation mark ":" often is changed to ";" or to a hyphen. Words or phrases are placed within quotation marks where none were in the title of the published article. The same article in PubMed or PsycINFO has the correct title. Even worse, the ending page number is wrong or omitted almost 5 percent of the time for older articles and only somewhat less frequently for more recent ones. Another problem I've found is that some American English words are changed to British English spellings and vice-versa.
I've convinced my students to use a bibliographic utility such as Zotero [this year more are using Zotero than any of the commercial products] but now systematic errors are being introduced into the reference lists of their papers.
I know that the title changes are introduced at entry because I receive the same electronic feeds of xml data from publishers and the titles in the files are the same as the titles of the published article. Does anyone know why this database provider seems to intentionally insert errors? My questions to Thompson-ISI aren't answered. The errors are not from my import process -- the errors are on the WoS webpages (http://apps.isiknowledge.com.libproxy....). I import WoS-based citations into Zotero via BibTeX.
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DWL-SDCAAfter doing a bit of more-organized examination of the citations in WoS I wonder if these changes are an over-done Mountweazel (or copyright trap). A standard Mountweazel is a complete fabrication -- a fictitious entry designed to detect plagiarism. If this is the purpose of the errors (I can't think of any other purpose) the usefulness of downloading metadata to any bibliographic software is being sacrificed to a misguided corporate desire to control content. Yes, every author should always examine each actual cited document to verify that the citation from a citing document was copied correctly and that the citation accurately represents was was written in the original work. Certainly, the greatest value of any online literature database is its usefulness at locating articles relevant to current research. However, as more and more students and professionals use bibliography management software as a tool for writing; that one of the most useful online databases contains built-in errors is frustrating.
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