I agree this would be a nice feature, but I'm not sure exactly how one would do it from a UI and programming standpoint. Say you have inserted multiple bibliographies, for example. How would the macro code know what citation apply to what bibliographies?

I'd almost want to say that if you have different chapters, each should have its own file and associated bibliography, but be assembled together via master documents. If one wanted only a single bibliography for the entire book, then it should be inserted in the master document perhaps.

WRT to:

I know that's not so big problem, because I could divide a book into different .odt files, and later merge them. The bibliographies and citations don't change until I refresh, but my editor would have nightmares if something changes at the end...

... this I'm not following. How is what you propose any worse than what I propose? More importantly, why is it a problem to have mutiple files?

A solution could be associate bibliographies to sections, as the page numbers. If it's easy to program or not, I really don't know...

Instead of sections, it would make more sense to associate the bibliographies to sub documents in a master document.

For more information about using master documents in OOo, you can check out Chapter 13 of the OOoAuthors' Writer Guide: http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/oooauthors2/index.html

Let me pitch in too. I am not familiar with Zotero development neither with its source so forgive me if I lack details below.

Having multiple bibliographies is not a rare situation. It is quite common to find situation as the OP described here. It is also common to see two sections listing some references. One is usually called References with list of citations in the text, and the other is Bibliography, with a list of recommended reading but not cited in the text.

In any case, having a multiple bibliography feature is, IMHO, a must for any bib. manager which is expected to be powerful.

Perhaps latex's Natbib can be studied to see how to implement it. In that, we just create as many bibliographies as we want. Each bibliography is accompanied with its own unique cite command (e.g. \cite is for regular references, \BibCite can be for another bibliography, etc.). This way the actual cite command used tells the bibliography where a citation belongs in the document.

Perhaps we can have something similar in Zotero. Something like, for each document:
1. have a default bibliography, perhaps named Bibliography.
2. have an option of creating new bibliographyies within that doc.
3. Each new bibliography is given a unique name, e.g. BibChap1, BibChap2, etc.
4. Each bibliography is accompanied with a cite command for itself.
5. While citing, a user picks a bibliography item and also must choose the bibliography in which that citation belongs.
6. When the lists of bibliographies are created, creation of each list involves specifying which bibliography is to be created (BibChap1 or BibChap2 or any other).

This way, one can create BibChap1, Bibchap2 and others along with the default bib where ever one wants in the document.

->HS

Hi bdarcus,

I understand what you mean about having a cite command for each biblio. Yes, a variable should also work. All that is needed is to identify which bibliography a particular citation belongs.

I do not know how XML works, but using a unique command for each biblio. might be unnecessary hard work and a variable, as you suggested, might be more sensible to work with.

Regards.