I would add my request to this. I started to research a large book about three years ago and have thousands of entries in Citation 9. My attempts to import them into Zotero -- by whatever means -- have all failed. I have several doctoral students with the same problem. Is there any hope of a solution?

Citation exports a bad RIS file: No ER- tags and there's just too much junk created from notes, tags, etc.

Refer output creates a file that stalls the Zotero import and generates an error messge. After I clear the error message I'm left with a slew of bad entries that I must delete before restoring my Zotero database.

No luck with anything produced by Citation exports. The closest I've come to getting anything useful from Citation to Zotero is downloading an Endnote eval version, importing the Citation file and exporting it to RIS for import into Zotero. It's a messy import with lots of work needed with the individual records so until/if Zotero develops a Citation import filter, I guess I'm stuck.

Add me too. I have been using Citation for a decade and have v. 9x. I have thousands of items in my Citation data files. However, Citations dependence on ASCII is a major obstacle to my use (Middle Eastern Languages). I cannot enter a Czech author, a Hebrew title, etc. I have talked with tech support for Citation and they have no plans for moving to Unicode. So now I have just downloaded Zotero which sounds good. Now I see problems in converting my data base. BTW, could I use Zotero offline or must it always have internet connection?

I'm not following the instructions by noksagt. Are you suggesting that we convert the Citation 9 file to a citavi file?

I'm generally confused by Citation 9. How do you export anything from Citation 9? I can see how to convert files into Citation, but not out of.

I saved the Citation file as a refer-en.cf file. Then when I try to import, Zotero tries to download the file (dialog box for open with vs save, then download manager pops up). Then the progress bar hums along forever, never finishing.

Any help?

dialog box for open with vs save, then download manager pops up

If this happens, it will never import. Confirm your references are in the refer format. If they are not, paste the first few lines of the file here.

If they are, you can try to convert the character encoding of the file or copy the contents to the clipboard & use Zotero 2's import from clipboard feature.

Ok, I got the file to convert--messy as it is. (It was saved as a .cit file before, so I just changed the extension to .txt. Is there a better extension that might help?)

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix the messiness? For example
1) all of my notes are separated from their original works

2) all of my tags are gone

Thanks for all the help so far. I'm getting there!

I'm sorry it's been a while.

I tried what was suggested:
1. I exported my .cit file to a file in refer-en.cf format. (I couldn't figure out how to import into Zotero via clipboard.)
2. I opened the file in Notepad and saved as a .txt.
3. I imported the .txt file into Zotero.

More or less, things worked. However I am trying to work out the major kinks.
1. My notes are now disassociated from the citation of the work. The notes are in Zotero. They're just totally separate entries.
2. My "series name" field comes up blank in Zotero.
3. My tags are often in a list for a given entry, separated by semicolons. In Zotero, each series of tags is considered a single tag. So rather than "x; y; z" being three tags (x & y & z), it's considered a single tag, "x; y; z".

Any suggestions? What questions am I not addressing?

Thanks!

So now I can see that my problem is with the Citation exporter. No matter what format I use (refer-en, refer, endnote, ris), I end up with big problems with info in the wrong categories and such.

I looked at the custom format converter, and I don't understand the system, so I can't fix it. I'm not expecting much from Citation support.

Any suggestions?