Abbreviations for over 38000 NCBI journal titles

[stroobandt]

Unfortunately, the early 2019 #6 PR by @retorquere went already stale, even before it ever got merged.

However, the current PR also fixes issue #4 and largely expands the amount of abbreviated NCBI journals to over 38000 by including not only the indexed journals, but also those that were referenced by NCBI.

JSON file extraction from XML is done in XSLT; which runs orders of magnitude faster than the previous interpreted Python script.

Finally, the use and contents of a number of different journal title abbreviation files is carefully documented.

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NCBI Journal Title Abbreviations

The abbreviations of over 38000 journal titles referenced in the catalogue of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of the US National Library of Medicine, are provided in JSON format. This allows Pandoc and other programs to produce references with correctly abbreviated journal titles in accordance with the American Medical Association Manual of Style.

Topics not only cover the entire spectrum of biomedical and life sciences, but also include many related fields.

[retorquere]

@rmzelle I'm OK with this PR being merged instead of mine. I could use that as a starting point for prepping for npmjs releases.

[stroobandt]

@retorquere Thank you for supporting this PR.
That is very kind of you.

[retorquere]

@rmzelle is it not desirable to have this transformation? I could really use it.

[rmzelle]

@stroobandt, @retorquere, apologies for the wait.

@adam3smith, looks fine to me.

[adam3smith]

Thank you very much!

[retorquere]

The XML source files are all empty (zero bytes).

[stroobandt]

@retorquere The XML input files are empty on purpose because of their file size and the fact that, because of this, these do not go down well with git. Moreover, these are not source code files, but rather input data files.

How to obtain a fresh copy of these XML input files, is explained in detail in the accompanying README.md.

The much smaller JSON output files are included. Most users only need these.