How to manually populate Zotero minimum information for RTF scan?
It seems that if I want to use RTFScan, the bibliography needs to be of the form:
{Author, "Title", Date}
The zotero GUI though seems to want creator and date. I noticed that the 'key' info grabbed via the zotero web plugin is not always consistent. I am going to assume that the creator is the author. How would I enter this information more easily. I sometimes struggle with populating this data manually because on the menu on the right (in include image), I am restricted to the keys that are already included. I want to enter the information for title, creator and date, so that the RTF scan work properly.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u14168690/fx62zct6u1v7s5kqhcg8.png
{Author, "Title", Date}
The zotero GUI though seems to want creator and date. I noticed that the 'key' info grabbed via the zotero web plugin is not always consistent. I am going to assume that the creator is the author. How would I enter this information more easily. I sometimes struggle with populating this data manually because on the menu on the right (in include image), I am restricted to the keys that are already included. I want to enter the information for title, creator and date, so that the RTF scan work properly.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u14168690/fx62zct6u1v7s5kqhcg8.png
https://www.zotero.org/support/rtf_scan
Zotero's *automated* scannable cite entries include extra information to avoid ambiguity. You can use Edit\Copy As Scannable Cite or the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Shift-C) to get those unambiguous entries easily for pasting the selected item's citation into your document.
Any remaining ambiguity in manual entries is resolved when you run Tools\RTF Scan from within Zotero desktop, as the last step in processing. At some point in the future Zotero may get a unambiguous, displayed citekey (like that used by Endnote and the RTF/ODF-Scan plugin), which will make manual entries unambiguous too (which may allow scannable-cite documents to be processed entirely within the word processor plugins).
That is the sort of ambiguity that I want to fix as soon as I pull.
I don't know what information Zotero has access to for scraping a web page's creator and date, nor therefore why those Zotero fields are often empty. My guess would be that the web page has not provided that information. I often find myself filling in a web page's missing author or date field manually, if the page author has put their name and a date at the top of the web page (which of course page authors don't always do).
Regarding less ambiguous citations, you can try the RTF/ODF-Scan plugin. It uses an ODT file instead of an RTF file. ODT files can now be read and written by Microsoft Word (LibreOffice was the traditional way of doing that).
http://zotero-odf-scan.github.io/zotero-odf-scan/
1. I am not asking about fixing the web plugin tool.
2. The web plugin successfully pulls the information from the website but naturally not all data is necessarily available to pull. Or the tool can't grab certain data.
3. I want to manually enter this data in zotero. As you see in the picture I posted in the original post, for the resource with title 'The Constitution', zotero's web plugin has NOT populated the creator column or the date column. I want to edit these fields. When I left click on the record in the table, the side nav shows for that record. But the 'keys' don't necessarily match the names in the table.
Essentially, I want to always ensure (at a minimum) that all records have a title, creator, and date populated. The menu on the sidenav sometimes has date, author, effective date, accessed date, creator, title, short title, and a bunch of other details. It is not always clear which fields I need to populate to 'ensure' that I fill the three fields that I care about.
My question therefore is, what is the best way to ensure I populate this data.
To ensure I don't have duplicates, I want to always populate those three fields. These fields serve as keys for RTF scan.
Is my clarification helpful?
On the ODT scan, I had trouble setting that up. But i will take a second look.
"Date" refers to the primary date (i.e. "Date" for most item types).
"Title" is always right under the item type and is (and is literally "Title" for most item types)
- I know of overleaf. Great if I want to focus primarily on latex.
- RStudio I thought was just an IDE for R.
- Fidus writer seems interesting. Don't know anything about it.
- Markdown is a useful format, but I am not sure how it serves as a bib manager and citation tool.
But it sounds like you are saying be prepared to work on a paper, and stick with a specific citation style for that paper. I use RTF citation because rtf scan allows me to swap RTF citation with any other style such as IEEE, Chicago, MLA, etc.
Perhaps you are saying that if stuck with overleaf, I could still use zotero for managing by references, but use overleaf with it somehow?
I use a writing app called scrivener. It CAN export to latex, but it sucks. It does a better job export to word docx format. It has a bunch of other export format, but I haven't tried them. It possible can export to some sort of markdown format.
Anyway, my thought is, write in scrivener. Export to docx or markdown. Any citations, use the csl style that apparently pandoc supports. Now, I don't properly understand how the csl referencing system works, so that will take experimentation. But have references in zotero. Export references to biblatex format file. Then using pandoc run:
pandoc --bibliography=zotero.bib --citeproc -o [someoutputformat] test.md
pandoc --bibliography=zotero.bib --citeproc -o [someoutputformat] test.docx
I HAVE tested pandoc for converting docx to md or tex files and I am satisfied with them. However, I haven't tried out replacing the references with the csl style.
It occurred to me just now that I don't know how to tell pandoc to use a particular citation style when it creates citations and bibliography.
It seems to me that in order to get the unique key for biblatex keys, I need to select my references then export to a .bib file. Until I do this, I don't know what the keys are. Am I correct? This means that if I am researching on the fly as I am writing, then I won't know the keys to add into the written document?
It seems like the workflow I have to follow is:
1. Collect references before and as I write.
2. Write but add some search and replace signifier...say $$cite within the text.
3. When I am done with paper, select my references in zotero. Then export to .bib.
4. Then do the manual work of replacing $$cite with the keys from the .bib.
Is there a better way? There seems to also be a better bibtex plugin, but I am not sure what that is for exactly.