How many times are articles cited by the references in my library?

ElsaBoulard

Hi everyone,

I am conducting a systematic review and I would like to identify potential missing references by including articles that have been cited by at least 5 references in my Zotero library. Is there a straightforward and quick way to perform this identification, or do I have to count everything manually?

Thanks for your help !

adamsmith

Zotero itself isn't even aware which items are cited.
You can install the add-on discussed here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/103205/is-it-possible-to-extract-references-from-article-pdfs-webpage to extract the references. You'd then have to find a way to create a count of those across the library, which will be trickier. I don't believe anyone has discussed the exact question you're asking here before.

tim820

Agreed, no way to do a cumulative count automatically that I know of.

You could copy the list of each paper's cited references from the above-mentioned addon (zotero-reference) to file (an inbuilt automatic option ... just not sure where that file is stored) or paste via clipboard, the latter mentioned here:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/436811/#Comment_436811

Then you could code something externally to read all those reference list files and sort/count the cited references. Or just paste the lists into Excel and sort by title to group citations.

Then you would need to compare that list to a list of the papers you already have.

If you don't want to impose the 'at least 5' criterion, zotero-reference can tell you if a single cited reference is already in your library, by DOI matching.

One barrier to doing any of that is that no method of extracting a paper's reference list (Crossref API call or PDF text parsing) is currently 100% accurate. So the file lists would require manual checking/editing.

Another way to do it that might work could be to export your list of references from Zotero, and then write code with API calls to Crossref or OpenAlex (or several other emerging databases) to get each of their cited reference lists. If most of your source references are from recent years and in conventional journals then those databases quite possibly contain most of their cited reference lists. The advantage of the zotero-reference addon is that it can instead use PDF text parsing to get the reference list if the Crossref API call does not come back accurate.