Hyperlink to bibliography

Irmy

With the Zotero Office Word add-in, is it possible to hyperlink the citations in the text to the corresponding citation in the bibliography, like with EndNote?

adamsmith

not currently, no.

annakelly

this would be a really great feature; any indication of when it will be avaialble? Anna

fbennett

I'll probably implement this in the processor within the next month or so. It will be a significant change in behavior, so we'll need to step gingerly, and it will be up to the core team whether and exactly how to make the facility available, but there should at least be potential for movement on this fairly soon.

(Edit: whoa, hold that thought -- I misread the headline post [ouch!]. What will be implemented fairly soon is hyperlinking of URLs and DOIs, not links between cited items and the bibliography. The latter is a bit more complicated, and will take longer.)

annakelly

expectations raised and sadly dashed! such a great product; hopefully it wont take too long.

fbennett

The tricky bit with internal linking is the reverse reference, from the bib entry back into the text. In that direction, there can be multiple targets, and each application that uses the processor will want to handle it a little differently. There is actually a hook in the processor for this purpose, introduced some time ago (for use in the KnowledgeBlog project). It isn't properly documented yet, and if I get documentation in place it will be easier for the core developers to tie into it.

simon50000

Is it possible that one-way linking (from each mention to bibliography entry) could be done as an intermediate solution? Even this alone would be incredibly useful.

antikorpo

+1 to intermediate one-way linking. Some Word-Processors or PDF-Viewers (e.g. Adobe Acrobat Reader XI) have a "previous view" button or function (optional), so it's easy to find back.

I don't know if MS Word or LibreOffice support this, but during editing one can type something, click on the hyperlink and then undo the typing, which jumps the view back to where you were typing.

For the reverse reference we actually need something like Wikipedia uses: e.g. a bibliography reference like [5. ^ a b Daan S, Barnes BM, Strijkstra AM (1991). "Warming up for sleep? Ground squirrels sleep during arousals from hibernation". Neurosci. Lett. 128 (2): 265–8. doi:10.1016/0304-3940(91)90276-Y] (example from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#cite_note-syllabus-3), where "a" and "b" are links to the places where the citation is made. when there is only one citation, the "^" is used as the link and there are no letters.

So citation styles probably need to adapt to this hyperlinking feature, possibly in a more subtle (and backwards compatible for printing on paper) way like "(cited on pages 3, 7a, 7b and 9)" with the numbers or letters being links or similar.

aurimas

More discussion here: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12431/word-possibility-to-link-references-and-bibliography-in-a-document/

z8080

+1 to the OP's suggestion of bibliography hyperlinking, i.e. (if I understood it correctly) having the full reference appear in a tool tip when hovering the mouse over the in-text citation, and being able to click on the in-text citation as a hyperlink to the relevant part of the Bibliography.

onedayonenoodle

+1 to the above.

aletatic

2017, still nothing?

DWL-SDCA

Easy to envision. Difficult to accomplish. I did a quick search but couldn't find the post that explained why this isn't easy and already done. (I'd love to have this feature.)

adamsmith

There is a variety of reasons this isn't trivial, but one of the bigger ones is that citeproc-js (the tool that Zotero uses to create citations and bibliographies) creates the bibliography as a single field, so there are no anchors to individual citations in there that would be easy to link to. I'm not sure how easy this is to change (I think it's a fairly substantive change, but @fbennett can correct me if I'm wrong) but that also prevents a more robust 3rd party tool (i.e. just a macro in Word).
Similarly, the in-text citation is a single field, so getting the hyperlinks right for citations with multiple items is tricky.

zhangxaochen

I was using bibtex4word (b4w), and it's powerful including turning citations into hyperlinks. Why in Zotero it becomes difficult & non-trivial...

bwiernik

bibtex and Zotero are completely different tools with completely different structures. Like adamsmith says, the tool Zotero uses to create bibliographies and the part of the Word program that Zotero connects to (Fields) just don't provide this functionality.

fbennett

I don't follow developments in Word, LibreOffice, and RTF markup, so don't know what the technical constraints would be. The processor can produce output with IDs that distinguish individual items, but I don't know what that would look like in RTF, and I don't know what elements of RTF markup survive insertion into a Word or LO document. I don't have time to work on it myself, but would be happy to advise on processor hooks if someone wants to take it on.