Periods in journal abbreviations

CSL Development
1

Some style guides require journal abbrevations with periods, others without
(e.g. “Nat. Cell Biol.” vs. “Nat Cell Biol”, see
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=journals&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=21417),
although the abbrevation itself is the same. As removing periods is easier
than adding them (as in the example Cell shouldn’t receive a period), I made
the choice to use the journal abbreviations with periods in all the entries
of my Zotero library. The only caveat here is that I don’t have an easy way
to remove the periods if needed. Is there a possible addition to CSL to
facilitate this? I can think of the following:

  • allow multiple abbreviation fields. This would require more input from the
    user, and clear ways to call a certain abbreviation type from within CSL
    styles.
  • allow automatic conversion of abbreviation fields in the CSL
    implementations (e.g. strip/add periods). Adding periods would require some
    knowledge on which words shouldn’t receive a period, but removing periods
    should be relatively easy, although I don’t know what kind of syntax that
    could take: maybe some kind of strip-command could be added, e.g. .

Any thoughts?

Rintze

2

This has come up before.

http://sourceforge.net/search/index.php?group_id=117435&search_subject=1&search_body=1&type_of_search=mlists&all_words=&exact_phrase=strip+period&some_word=&without_words=&ml_name[]=xbiblio-devel&posted_date_start=&posted_date_end=&form_submit=Search

Do you think you can read through those threads and come back with a
(potentially revised) proposal?

Bruce2009/3/22 Rintze Zelle <@Rintze_Zelle1>:

3

Actually, this is the only thread:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=0BB1DD0A-287B-483C-958D-0131B8FDFCEC%40simonster.com

Bruce

4

If I read that thread correctly, what’s concluded is that this might be a
possible solution (which is a bit more elegant than my previous proposal):

Rintze

5

Hi Bruce,

Have you got any opinion on this one? Having the data from
http://periodicals.dataincubator.org/.html will only supply matching between
full and abbreviated journal titles, and doesn’t help distinguishing between
multiple abbreviations per journal. But most of the variation is in the use
of periods, and thus a way to strip periods would be a very valuable and
simple to implement (intermediate) solution. You expressed some concern that
this shouldn’t be handled at the text-element level, but I can’t come up
with a good alternative from looking at the current schema.

Rintze---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rintze Zelle <@Rintze_Zelle>
Date: Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: [xbiblio-devel] Periods in journal abbreviations
To: development discussion for xbiblio xbiblio-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

If I read that thread correctly, what’s concluded is that this might be a
possible solution (which is a bit more elegant than my previous proposal):

Rintze