UPDATE (10/10/2013): The newest version of Mendeley (1.10.1) now supports
journal abbreviations, so go out there and upgrade! I’ve also removed the file
since it isn’t necessary any longer.
Whilst working on my latest journal paper today, I needed to include journal
abbreviations in my bibliography. Unfortunately, the software I use to manage my
references, Mendeley, does not include a method to automatically abbreviate
journal titles in references. Fortunately, there is a workaround.
As detailed in this forum
post,
the method is to create a file in the user data folder that Mendeley can read.
The following steps worked on Win7, Word 2010, Mendeley 1.5.2:
- Open the Mendeley Data Folder (
"C:\Users\_Username_\AppData\Local\Mendeley
Ltd\Mendeley Desktop") or by Ctrl+Shift+D in Mendeley. The keyboard
shortcut opens the Debug dialog, simply click “Open Data Folder”
- Create a folder called
journalAbbreviations
- Create a file in that folder called
default.txt
-
Put the journal then the abbreviation separated by a tab so:
Proceedings of the Combustion Institute Tab Proc. Combust. Inst.
Also, other users have invented much more complicated ways of getting the
journal abbreviations file:
http://www.alexchubaty.com/post/2012-02-28-list-of-abbreviated-journal-names/
Finally, your citation style must be set up to use abbreviated journal names -
not all of them are, and some that should be aren’t. The fix is simple: in the
CSL file add the form="short" attribute to the <text> tag containing your
variable="container-title". More about editing CSL for Mendeley can be found
by googling on the
Mendeley website. I might do a post about
more CSL stuff later.