# short titles

**URL:** <https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/short-titles/175>\
**Category:** CSL Development\
**Created:** [August 5, 2006, 2:39pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/short-titles/175 "2006-08-05T14:39:26Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 8\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [August 5, 2006, 2:39pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/short-titles/175/1 "2006-08-05T14:39:26Z")

</div>

Actually, it might be easier to just write some little code that can  
automatically create the abbreviations when given a full title? Am not  
very good at that sort of thing …

Bruce

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**Author:** ![Simon\_Kornblith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce7236/32.png) [@Simon\_Kornblith](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Simon_Kornblith)\
**Post date:** [August 5, 2006, 4:36pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/short-titles/175/2 "2006-08-05T16:36:32Z")

</div>

> Actually, it might be easier to just write some little code that can  
> automatically create the abbreviations when given a full title? Am not  
> very good at that sort of thing …

I did some googling on this subject, and the results weren’t pretty:

> The appearance of the ISO standard for abbreviating journal titles was not  
> greeted by universal acceptance. It would appear that even today, some major  
> journal indexes/databases do not follow this ISO standard. For example,  
> although Medline (Index Medicus) and INSPEC (Science Abstracts) have  
> established a high degree of conformance to this ISO standard, other major  
> tools like SciFinder Scholar (Chemical Abstracts) or Biosis (Biological  
> Abstracts) have not.

There’s a list of ISO abbreviations (not in XML) at  
ftp://nlmpubs.nlm.nih.gov/online/journals/lsiweb.pdf. I’d expect with some  
searching around on the NLM site you might be able to find some XML. A  
regular expression might also work. The NLM site notes at  
[http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/constructitle.html](http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/constructitle.html) that:

> NLM establishes title abbreviations based on the rules outlined in Information  
> and Documentation, Rules for the Abbreviation of Title Words and Titles of  
> Publications (ISO 4, 3rd ed. 1997) and American National Standard for  
> Information Sciences, Abbreviation of Titles for Publications (ANSI  
> Z39.5–1985). Where the ISO standard instructions conflict with the ANSI  
> standard, NLM generally prefers the ANSI standard, despite the fact that this  
> is no longer a current U.S. standard. In some instances, NLM’s rules for  
> title abbreviations differ from both existing standards.

The list of title abbreviations they use comes from the ISSN International  
Centre, and would apparently cost 111 euros for those of us residing in  
industrialized nations. I’m not having much luck finding a copy of either  
the ISO or ANSI standards online. While it would certainly be nice to handle  
journal abbreviations automatically, we may need to rely on user input here.

Simon

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**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [August 5, 2006, 4:52pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/short-titles/175/3 "2006-08-05T16:52:15Z")

</div>

Yeah. I suppose one way is to do it in code, but then allow a user to  
confirm or override. I just pinged Alf Eaton about the NLM stuff (he’s  
the author of HubMed).

A problem is that most users (me included) really have no clue how to  
abbreviate this stuff!

Am asking about this now because I’m trying to work out the conventions  
for the id an link values on the CSL files. Right now, they are the  
same, using an abbreviated title for the name.

The user issue matters when creating styles, BTW. Would like a little  
script or other interface where I can do:

```
createstyle

```

… be prompted for:

```
full title
based on (APA, etc.)

```

… and then it would automatically create the file, with proper id,  
link, and file name of course.

Bruce

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**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [August 7, 2006, 12:18pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/short-titles/175/4 "2006-08-07T12:18:11Z")

</div>

FYI from Alf …Begin forwarded message:

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**Author:** ![Matthias\_Steffens](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a88e4f/32.png) [@Matthias\_Steffens](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Matthias_Steffens)\
**Post date:** [August 9, 2006, 10:44am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/short-titles/175/5 "2006-08-09T10:44:28Z")

</div>

Hi,

> The list of title abbreviations they use comes from the ISSN International  
> Centre, and would apparently cost 111 euros for those of us residing in  
> industrialized nations. I’m not having much luck finding a copy of either  
> the ISO or ANSI standards online.

The “List of Title Word Abbreviations” ([http://www.issn.org/en/node/88](http://www.issn.org/en/node/88))  
seems to be available online in human-readable form:

[http://www.issn.org/en/node/344](http://www.issn.org/en/node/344)

As far as I can see, the machine-readable form is not available, though.  
With a bit of work, source data could be extracted from the  
human-readable HTML files but, obviously, it would be better if this  
could be avoided…

Regarding simple online lists of journal abbreviations, I’m aware of the  
following ones:

Bioscience - Journal Name Abbreviation, ISSN Number and Coverage:  
[http://www.bioscience.org/atlases/jourabbr/list.htm](http://www.bioscience.org/atlases/jourabbr/list.htm)

ISI Journal Abbreviations Index:  
[http://library.caltech.edu/reference/abbreviations/](http://library.caltech.edu/reference/abbreviations/)

Thomson Scientific Journal List:  
[http://www.isinet.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlresults.cgi?PC=D](http://www.isinet.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlresults.cgi?PC=D)

Matthias

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [August 9, 2006, 1:20pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/short-titles/175/6 "2006-08-09T13:20:37Z")

</div>

It might not be a bad idea to try to build up a free, machine-readable,  
list? It’d probably be smarter to standardize the logic than the list  
of journal abbreviations per se.

I just put the list I started with in a YAML file …

american: Am  
annals: An  
association: Assoc  
british: Br  
geographers: Geog  
geography: Geog  
historical: Hist  
institute: Inst  
journal: J  
political: Pol  
review: Rev  
sociology: Soc  
transactions: Trans

… and then the script loads it:

require ‘yaml’

class String  
IGNORE = [“of”, “the”]

TERMS = YAML::load(File.open(“abbrev.yaml”))

def abbreviate(form=“display”)  
words = self.split(/\W+/)  
abbreviated\_words = []  
words.each do |word|  
if IGNORE.find{|w| w.downcase == word.downcase} then  
nil  
elsif TERMS[word.downcase] then  
abbreviated\_words \<\< TERMS[word.downcase]  
else  
abbreviated\_words \<\< word  
end  
end  
if form == “filename” then  
abbreviated\_words.join("\_").downcase + “.csl"  
else  
abbreviated\_words.join(” ")  
end  
end  
end

Note: ideally the file of abbreviations would have roots as keys, and  
the script could therefore know that both “geography” and "geographer"  
become “geog” … but I don’t know how to do that.

Bruce

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**Author:** ![James\_Howison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ac8455/32.png) [@James\_Howison](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/James_Howison)\
**Post date:** [August 9, 2006, 3:40pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/short-titles/175/7 "2006-08-09T15:40:38Z")

</div>

Is this just for the names of the csl files? Or are you trying to  
build this logic into bibliographic output. Personally I find the  
abbreviations incredibly obtuse, and have trouble seeing them as  
anything other than a hangover from earlier, less memory profligate,  
days 😉

Would you mind reminding me of the purpose of this? Sorry for  
falling behind!

–J

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [August 9, 2006, 3:46pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/short-titles/175/8 "2006-08-09T15:46:14Z")

</div>

> Is this just for the names of the csl files? Or are you trying to  
> build this logic into bibliographic output. Personally I find the  
> abbreviations incredibly obtuse, and have trouble seeing them as  
> anything other than a hangover from earlier, less memory profligate,  
> days 😉

Agreed.

> Would you mind reminding me of the purpose of this?

The immediate goals was to generate smart CSL file names and IDs/URIs.  
But software often has to this in some form too, so was just wondering  
if we could kill a couple birds with one stone.

Of course, right now it’s no real worry; can just manually generate the  
IDs/file names.

Bruce