Upgrade StorageNames, variant spellings, entities
Two suggestions; let's start with the easiest one.
(1) Google Books and other repositories sometimes list authors in ALL CAPS. Zotero dutifully imports them that way, but since as far as I know there are no all caps surnames it would make sense to simply convert these to Lowercase With Starting Capital Letter.
(2) Is there a place where I can keep track of variants of names that refer to one and the same entity, and where I can clean those up? I don't blame Zotero for not knowing that 'Newman, Paul', 'Newman, P' and 'Newman, P.' in fact refer to the same person in my database, but it would be cool if there was an easy way to tell Zotero that these belong together. Essentially the same holds for Places (Massachusetts, MA / Massachusetts) and Publishers (John Benjamins Publishing Co / John Benjamins).
So I am proposing some interface that lists names that are similar to each other and then simply lets me say 'these three belong together, please use the second variant and ditch the other two, thank you.'
It seems to me that an interface like this is indispensable in a tool like Zotero, which can import from many repositories, all with their own notational conventions and idiosyncrasies. The ease of grabbing data is addictive, but there has to be an equally easy way of pruning variant spellings, otherwise we'll all end up with inconsistent bibliographies.
(I know that I can currently sort by author or publisher and bring things in line manually, but that is going to be a hell of a lot of work in any serious database.)
[edit: moved to Feature Requests]
(1) Google Books and other repositories sometimes list authors in ALL CAPS. Zotero dutifully imports them that way, but since as far as I know there are no all caps surnames it would make sense to simply convert these to Lowercase With Starting Capital Letter.
(2) Is there a place where I can keep track of variants of names that refer to one and the same entity, and where I can clean those up? I don't blame Zotero for not knowing that 'Newman, Paul', 'Newman, P' and 'Newman, P.' in fact refer to the same person in my database, but it would be cool if there was an easy way to tell Zotero that these belong together. Essentially the same holds for Places (Massachusetts, MA / Massachusetts) and Publishers (John Benjamins Publishing Co / John Benjamins).
So I am proposing some interface that lists names that are similar to each other and then simply lets me say 'these three belong together, please use the second variant and ditch the other two, thank you.'
It seems to me that an interface like this is indispensable in a tool like Zotero, which can import from many repositories, all with their own notational conventions and idiosyncrasies. The ease of grabbing data is addictive, but there has to be an equally easy way of pruning variant spellings, otherwise we'll all end up with inconsistent bibliographies.
(I know that I can currently sort by author or publisher and bring things in line manually, but that is going to be a hell of a lot of work in any serious database.)
[edit: moved to Feature Requests]
Can you provide an example of a page where authors are imported as all-caps?
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=LIC&volumeId=40&issueId=01&iid=1692780
among others
Please, the issue of publishers providing author names in all-caps is really frustrating for me. Editing each author name is a real annoyance. This is particularly a problem when the authors' names include decorated characters. I have resorted to a text file of about a zillion characters that I use to paste into the names.
I would be so very happy if:
1) all the translators took care of this (some journals from Elsevier, Emerald, Informa, Inderscience, Springer, Wiley and others present all-caps authors' names). Is there ever a need to have all caps authors in the Zotero database?
or
2) A system like the right-click title case / lower case conversion were implemented for author names.
I am finding more and more article records with all upper-case author names.
I recognize that the issue of author names where the first character or two should be lower case and a later character upper case. While that may complicate my option 1, I don't see an operational problem for option 2. With option 2 there while there will need to be some editing of the names, at least with a "title-case" option there would be fewer edits requiring cursor movements and placements.
As I said then, "It seems to me that an interface like this is indispensable in a tool like Zotero, which can import from many repositories, all with their own notational conventions and idiosyncrasies. The ease of grabbing data is addictive, but there has to be an equally easy way of pruning variant spellings, otherwise we'll all end up with inconsistent bibliographies."
That was well over three years ago. I think everyone's library has become at least ten times larger since, making the problem (one would think) ten times as bad and (one would hope) ten times as urgent to fix.
"Title Case this name"
and
"Title Case all names" (of the item)
Otherwise, having to change the capitalization of e.g. 10 authors for a single paper becomes rather repetitive.
For the issue of multiple variants in the DB, when you click on a surname to edit it and begin typing you get a dropdown list of similar names from the DB as a shortcut from which to choose a name that is already in the DB. If this same list was shown when you right click on name (ie as part of the context menu) then it would be a very simple matter to rclick on a name and select (another r click) using the mouse the correct alternative. So for 2 mouse clicks you kill 2 birds with 1 stone because you can click on an ALL CAPS name and selecting the title case variant that is already in your DB (eliminating the chance of duplicates).