Bibtex Key consistancy/exposure within zotero

aenertia

This is actually quite a biggy.

At the moment to make use of Zotero for Latex (or in fact anything using bibtex) you must first export to bibtex, and then fine tune bibtex keys by hand so they are consistent, or have there own naming schema.

This is a right PITA when you are adding new references to a zotero collect/are updating mis-imported data, as you need to re-export the bibtex from zotero, which will promptly screw with your custom bibtex edits.

The simplist way to deal with this is just to expose the bibtex key it will be exported as within zotero for any given object entry. Allowing consistancy of exports and life for latex users to be much better ;-)

One other thing I think it would be useful to automatically pre-fix bibtex keys in zotero with article or collection specific prefix's i.e

Journal Articles get the bibtex key prefixed with : JA:author_year
Books : BK:
News NW:
Website: WWW:

and so on.

Going further you could have the option to have each collection get a bibtex key prefix by default i.e for my Social Representations collection bibtex keys would get: SR:

This of course is user specific, the main thing is they you get that bibtex key identify exposed in the article entries so that exports to bibtex are consistent!


Kind regards

JoelW
Victoria University of Wellington
New Zealand

dstillman

Please do a search in the forums. This has been discussed quite a bit, and there's a ticket for exposing a citation key in the UI, though that won't happen until Zotero 1.5.

A customizable key, which would address your other requests, has also been discussed and is planned.

aenertia

Thanks, my bad. It's too early here. Is there any XUL hack I can do to expose the key in current builds?

dstillman

Is there any XUL hack I can do to expose the key in current builds?

Not really—it needs an SQL change (which is why it won't happen until 1.5, because we're not making any more schema changes in 1.0).

You could use one of the existing fields (that you don't use for anything else) and edit the BibTeX translator to use that field as a citation key, and then when there's official citation key support run a simple SQL command to move the data in those fields over.

aenertia

Ok thanks for the suggestion. Will have a look at the codebase when I get a min. Fairly low priority for me atm as am writting thesis.

Congrats on Zotero it is brilliant, and may be the thing I need to ween the Psych department off endnote and proprietary crap.