Another call for editable/formattable BibTeX keys

Hi.

Zotero looks very promising indeed, congrats for a job well done! I would, however, like to see the option of assigning an BibTex (or other system) key to an item by hand.

My reason for this is that I maintain a book-sized catalogue of animal species names with a LOT of BibTeX references. We are talking about tens of thousands of \cite{}'s in one manuscript here. Just a few sources -- previous catalogues -- make up the bulk of these citations.

I am currently using Bibus to manage the references, and have assigned very short keys to the few sources that are used over and over again (H, S91, S06 etc.). This keeps the TeX source readable.

I see the general formatting of autogenerated BibTeX keys can be set manually by hacking the corresponding .js file. This is no biggie for me, can do that, although a real UI would make it more accessible.

I guess I could solve this issue by post-processing the Zotero-generated bibtex files, but this seems like a rather inelegans solution.

Cheers,
Jere
  • I'm pretty sure at this point the state of the discussion isn't about "if" anymore - everyone agrees this should happen - but just a question of when and how exactly.
    Personally I consider this one of the most important missing features - not just for bibtex, but also for other non-plugin based citation methods, be it pandoc or even thinking about RTF-Scan.
  • Are there any updates on when this might happen? I've been looking back here every six months or so for a couple of years waiting for this so I can write a proper biber driver for Zotero.
  • I started working on this, but it's currently on hold. I would say 1-2 months.
  • I thought the main issue holding this back were field updates - we'd need a field for citation label (or so).
    Now that the API based sync is running, that should be one of the next things to happen, but unless Aurimas has a different idea, I think 1-2 months is still a bit optimistic. I'd be disappointed, though, if it didn't happen this calendar year.
  • I was thinking that we can hack this into the Extra field. I had some more flexible key generating scheme in mind (based on the syntax that's currently used)
  • edited April 17, 2013
    Any further update/ETA on this issue?

    I'm currently working on a script bridging vim-pandoc and the Zotero API, while using manually entered bibtex keys in the Extra field.

    I'm just using a ad hoc formula, i.e. "cite:[citationkey]" in the Extra field, with [citationkey] being my personal style "[authorname][YYYY][firstword]".

    But a standardized solution for storing the bibtex keys would be a lot better...

    (this leaves the issue of not being able to directly query the API for the Extra field/the citation key, but that is for another discussion)

    Edit:

    I just found this recent comment by adamsmith:

    "Bibtex export is improving continuously, but the biggest issue are citekeys, which we should be able to solve as soon as we get an identifier field (which is going to be in 4.2 almost certainly)."

    Which leads me to believe that being able to store citationkeys in the not-that-distant-future will be something I can place a reasonable bet on...
  • That pretty much sums it up. I'm pretty sure we'll get a field that's directly usable for the citekey in 4.2, but there's no ETA for that version. Here's Dan's statmenet on that:
    4.1:

    - API syncing
    - Probably full-text content syncing
    - Alpha or beta within a couple months

    4.2 (after 4.0 has been cut off from syncing):

    - New item types

    Batch editing might make it into 4.2, but new item types/fields are the
    top priority.
    So basically how fast this will happen depends a lot on how smoothly the switch in syncing to API syncing goes.
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