When I import my library from BibTeX, I notice that my journal titles, which I obsessively curate, are being overwritten based on values from elsewhere on the Web (including PubMed). The cases are also being overwritten. So for example “Folia Primatologica” (which is the universally referenced title of this journal in my field) becomes “Folia primatologica; international journal of primatology”, which is the title found in PubMed, but never seen elsewhere. I see the value of substituting standard titles, but is there a way to override this behavior? It is annoying in cases where I know that my titles are better.
We normalize journal titles whenever we can upon initial import using standardized titles. There is currently no way to turn this off. The only way is to edit it afterwards. Paperpile will never try to overwrite your edits.
Typically this behavior is what you want because BibTeX files are notorious for having a wide variety of journal titles and normalizing them makes things better (think about how many variations of PNAS are out there…)
I can see how that can be annoying in the case where the title from our sources are not what you want. However, in the vast majority of cases it’s only the journal abbreviation that matters (it’s what’s cited in most styles and shown in Paperpile).
I assume the abbreviation is correct also in your example.
Thanks for your reply. I do see your logic. The journal abbreviations indeed seem to come out right, and I agree with you that most cases require the abbreviations, but not a vast majority. as a primate geneticist I can think of three crucial journals off the top of my head: “American Journal of Primatology”, “International Journal of Primatology”, and “Molecular Ecology”.
Perhaps a compromise would be a way to bulk edit these journal names? Papers for example has a tab that allows for the management of unique journal titles across the library. I certainly do not want to go through and edit my thousands of papers one by one!
Ok, I did not realize that in your field so many journals use full journal names. I’ve worked in a relatively closely related field of Genomics and never encountered a single journal that printed full journal names.
Bulk editing is definitely on our radar: Bulk Editing of Papers and something we want to add eventually.
However, I don’t have a workaround at the moment other than to manually edit the titles. The quickest way would be to click on ‘Folia Primatologica’ somewhere in the list to filter for this journal and then start editing the first and click ‘Save and next’ in the edit dialog to go through the list.
Could it be an option to change this behavior in the reference list of the manuscript depending on the citation style rather than changing this in the reference manager? So using the above example “Folia primatologica; international journal of primatology” in the reference manager would become “Folia Primatologica” in the reference list. I understand this would require updating many referencing styles though.
This would be a pretty important feature for me as well, as most journals in my filed (ecology) require full initial-letters-capitalized journal names.
I’m having the same problem, 4 years later it seems. This is a serious problem. I’m having to edit almost all of the journal titles. This is really reducing the value I’m taking from Paperpile. You should, at the very least, have the option of preventing the system to override the data you provide.