need to automatically strip leading "the" from serial titles

[erazlogo]

citation styles don't use the leading "the" in serials (see 17.195 in Chicago Manual of Style) so it would be great to automatically strip them from imported articles. right now users end up with "The Chronicle of Higher Education" and "The American Historical Review" in the publication field and have to strip those manually. Can this be done in translators?

[dstillman]

This is universal for all styles? I'm generally wary of doing anything to the data on import rather than export, but if "The" is never useful for anything, it probably makes sense.

Simon's domain, either way.

[erazlogo]

i'm pretty sure it's universal for all styles (mla, apa definitely). but if this is easier to do during bibliography/note export, that would work also.

[stakats]

We would definitely want to do this on export, not import. That way we also avoid messing with localization issues – maybe "the" means something else in another language – since citation formats are likely to be more or less local to a given language.

[ajlyon]

Is this something that is described in CSL 1.0 and can citeproc-js handle it? It isn't done currently, and I can't find mention of it in the CSL 1.0 spec (hence CC'ed fbennett).

I reclassified this as a style ticket, since I'm in firm agreement with dstillman and stakats that this ought to be an export/style modification.

[fbennett]

citeproc-js does this in a couple of places currently -- when attempting to generate the citation-label variable (purely experimental), and when composing sort keys, but it's crude, with no sensitivity to user preferences or language selection.

There is some rough infrastructure in citeproc-js to support user-configurable match lists, for various field abbreviations and document-specific "hereinafter" strings. That could be exploited for this, if it comes to be tied into the UI.