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Journal-name problematics
| Journal-name problematics |
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Author: Thomas L Mead
Posted: 06/01/2001 15:56:11 GMT
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I'd love some help, tips, perspective on how to help people (I'm a
reference librarian teacher/helper, who does not really USE the program...)
who get into interesting conundrums with inconsistent journal-names. They
type stuff in. They copy & paste from colleagues' databases. They go to
PubMed. They go to our local-mounted web-based implementation of Ovid
Medline and use an importing filter I created, etc.
And thus they get various forms of journal names (basically: abbreviated
and/or full). And then they eventually note this inconsistency and want to
do something about it.
It seems to me that the "Journal List" tricks would be handy especially for
manually-entered database production.
I think what I have to do is play-play-play with "Journal lists" and a
database of imported references. What are the possibilities in this realm...?
Thoughts or tips are much appreciated! I'm at
Surely you don't want to read the lengthy-awful e-mail I'm composing to
someone here, but just in case you've nothing to do...
I'm still editing something like this:
--- someone here wrote:
British Medical Journal appears written out, or BMJ, or Brit Med Jour...or
whatever. Any way to standardize them?
I was going to call the Endnote people if this seems like a foreign problem
to you...
--- end of quote ---
are you ready?
there's WAR AND PEACE, and then there's this message!
do call the endnote people. they might have a suggestion or two.
here's what I know. if one were typing in lots of references from scratch,
there's a feature "Journal List" where you can set up a little database on
the side of lots of medical journals (all spelled out, e.g., New England
Journal of Medicine) -- and in that same little database you plug in the
official Medline/Index-Medicus abbreviation, e.g., N Engl J Med). There's
even a ready-made list of about 8000 medical journal names that comes with
the program that you can "import" into your database. I'd be careful.
But: most people:
a) don't learn the program well enough, deeply enough to discover and use
this feature, or
b) get an underling to type in references, or
c) they get an EndNote library from somebody else somehow, or
d) they IMPORT references directly from PubMed or Ovid, etc.
With imported references, you're getting a certain kind of
(federal/librarian-esque/rigid) perfection. If the journal says...
"Proc AMIA Symp" that's of course an abbreviation, and if it's there thanks
to an "import" process, then it's perfectly correct. And the problem is
that there's no cute trick or available automaticity-thingy which would
"flesh out" that abbreviation.
Additional conundrums...
The journal-names in references imported from PubMed come to EndNote as
abbreviations. The journal-names in references imported from
Dartmouth-Ovid-Medline come all fleshed out.
And then there are journal-name mysteries.
Like: Is "JAMA" the official name of the journal, or is it just a
popular/conventional-wisdom acronym that we've given to the Journal of the
American Medical Association? (Answer: JAMA is official)
And: "BMJ" is likewise now the OFFICIAL name of the journal, and it started
in 1988. (Which is RIDICULOUS, right? The journal started in 1857, under
the name "British Medical Journal")
So. The publishers do what they do. The librarian/catalogers just try to
keep up with their ridiculous name-changes. (One could write a long article
about AJR and the American Journal of Roentgenology and how they change
their official name willy-nilly hundreds of times as fashion dictates)
Medline (National Library of Medicine) attempts to keep up with the
absolute truth.
And we are left with a big mess. In regular-people's minds: BMJ or Brit Med
Jour or British Medical Journal or BMJ (Clinical Edition) is all the same
thing, and of course it is.
To do all this stuff CORRECTLY would drive one to distraction. Thank
goodness that editors aren't likely to care too much. Knowing about JAMA,
AJR, BMJ and a few of the trouble-makers certainly helps. Sticking to one
source for downloading (PubMed or Ovid) would help.
And: there ARE some nerdy/database-y tricks that could be done, after the
fact, when references are all in there already -- but talking-about the
tricks is nigh on to impossible. For example, if I had the database, the
time, the motivation, and a clear sense of purpose, etc. I could play,
think, test, don the pocket-protector, and muck all around trying to clean
up the database.
Hopefully it's just a few records that are troublesome, and the "Change
field..." trick will suffice.
Taking the "BMJ" example: one could do a search on the database for all
records that satisfy:
bmj
or
british medical journal
or
brit med j
and then change the journal-name field for all of those to whatever you
like -- with special care, please -- 'cuz you MIGHT be wrong. And you would
know this (from librarian-nerds like me, or books, or computer files which
reveal all this journal-detail...) that "BMJ" is the title, from 1988
forward. Yes it's an acronym. Yes it looks like an abbreviation. But it is
the title.
Ditto for JAMA.
And "AJR" ?
Utterly ridiculous. The title is:
AJR. American journal of roentgenology.
the whole stupid phrase. an abbreviation. period. the title
"CMAJ" is another one. The official title of the Canadian Medical
Association Journal.
So, you see...
There's no WAY that poor little EndNote can solve these problems.
I fear I've ranted.
(sigh)
Hopefully some of this is helpful.
If you have a couple hundred records on a narrow topic then the project is
small, and there won't be too many journals involved, and "fixing"
(consistent-izing) things won't be too horrendous.
If you have tens of thousands of records on a broad topic, then you should
send me the file and let me play and let me try to propose something. (the
first thing i would try to do is see if a new journal-list can be "created"
or "updated" from the file. then, see what that looks like. knowing all the
while that this "list" or "database" is at heart, back in the bowels of the
program, a simple tab-delimited text file somewhere on the hard-disk. i
think. it's been a long time. one must "reinvent" these tricks when one
must do the trick.)
-- Tom
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| Re: Journal-name problematics |
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Author: Selden Deemer
Posted: 09/01/2001 14:21:12 GMT
|
(Thomas L. Mead)
> I'd love some help, tips, perspective on how to help people (I'm a
> reference librarian teacher/helper, who does not really USE the
> program...) who get into interesting conundrums with inconsistent
> journal-names. They type stuff in. They copy & paste from colleagues'
> databases. They go to PubMed. They go to our local-mounted web-based
> implementation of Ovid Medline and use an importing filter I created,
> etc.
>
> And thus they get various forms of journal names (basically: abbreviated
> and/or full). And then they eventually note this inconsistency and want
> to do something about it.
>
> It seems to me that the "Journal List" tricks would be handy especially
> for manually-entered database production.
>
> I think what I have to do is play-play-play with "Journal lists" and a
> database of imported references. What are the possibilities in this
realm...?
Since you're a librarian, you are familiar with authority control, which
is what you are describing. EndNote 4 makes this much more accessible
than in previous versions and provides three files of full/abbreviated
journal titles (chemical.txt, medical.txt, and humanities.txt in its
Term Lists folder. The improved term list/authority control features
of EN4 alone may be worth the upgrade.
Chapter 9, "Term Lists," of the EndNote manual provides a good overview
of how term lists work, and why people should use them. That said,
maintaining *good* authority control requires work, and you may need to
sell your users on its importance. One can make a pretty good argument
that authority control is one of the things that differentiates a
library catalog from the world wide web.
One way to illustrate the mess created by variant titles is to customize
EndNote's display preferences to include Journal/Secondary Title and
Reference Type, then do a 2-level sort of a library on these fields
(primary RT, secondary JST). This will quickly reveal variations in
titles. The same principles can be applied to author names and subjects.
======================================================================
Selden Deemer, Library Systems Administrator PHONE: 404-727-0271
Emory University Libraries FAX: 404-727-0827
Atlanta, Georgia EMAIL:
======================================================================
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