add field "lastaccessed" to type "webpage"

nadiimahmed · May 16, 2023

ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) publications BibTex formating guidlines (https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/bibtex-formatting) show that ACM BibTex Reference Format (https://github.com/borisveytsman/acmart/blob/primary/ACM-Reference-Format.bst) uses the field "lastaccessed" instead of "accessdate". I use Overleaf to automatically sync my bibliography with Zotero libraries. But currently the export of BibTex or even BibLatex does not support the field "lastaccessed". So the last accessed date is not present in the final bibliography. Manual workaround is to use Better BibTex plugin and use a postscript like this to insert the field:

if (Translator.BetterBibTeX && zotero.itemType === 'webpage') { if (zotero.accessDate) { tex.add({ name: 'lastaccessed', value: zotero.accessDate.replace(/\s*T?\d+:\d+:\d+.*/, '')}); } }

But this means bib files have to be synchronized manually to Overleaf. This is a feature request to add this field to any export, whether online or desktop versions.

adamsmith · May 16, 2023

I don't really see us catering to the naming conventions of different bibtex styles.
For Zotero, the access data is the last accessed date. BibTeX (as it predates the WWW) doesn't have a standard for citing webpages, so you get the mess with different field names for what is conceptually the same metadata. For BibLaTeX, the name of the field is urldate and including a lastaccessed field would be incorrect.

The BBT solution is the only way to reasonably address this.

nadiimahmed · May 17, 2023

Thank you for your response. I thought I should try and ask. I had to add the same code to get a "lastaccessed" field for a "blogPost" item too. But in any case, the automated workaround for Overleaf which works really well that I was able to figure out yesterday, for anyone interested, is to enable DropBox synchroization through Overleaf and then have Better BibTex plugin do an auto export based on changes to your zotero library to the same folder on your desktop/laptop where your Overleaf project is stored. Then the bib file is synchronized to Overleaf almost in 5 seconds via DropBox and new citations are available for your use in Overleaf almost instantly. It is a smooth process which works very well. Instead of the Zotero to Overleaf intgeration especially if one is going customize Zotero bib/bibLatex exports.