Pandoc citation format as a citation style (with BetterBibTeX)?

Paul Kelleher

I am going to co-author with someone who wants to write in Word. We plan to use Zotero, and I suspect in-text citations will be achieved by using some standard citation style (e.g. Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition author-date). But I might later want to be able to use pandoc on the text, and it would be great to be able to convert all in-text citations from "(Jones 1992, 12)" to "[@Jones1992, p. 12]", where "@Jones1992" is the BetterBibTeX citation Key in my Zotero library.

I assumed someone would've created a citation style that could do this, but I can't seem to find one. Any pointers would be much appreciated!

adamsmith

I don't believe the BBT citation key is accessible to citation styles, which is why there's little in terms of citationstyle support for markdown, LaTex, or similar (though of course BBT does support its own citekeys for people who just write in plaintext formats).

Paul Kelleher

I appreciate the quick response! This is really disappointing news though!

I would've assumed that the "pin BibTeX citation key" feature could get around this.

adamsmith

I recently learned that pandoc can detect Zotero citations in Word docs, though, so you should be able to convert without this: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/446187/#Comment_446187 (haven't tested)

Paul Kelleher

Whoa! OK, thanks!

Paul Kelleher

I just did a test. I used pandoc to convert the Word doc to markdown. Sadly, while Pandoc does indeed convert the docx citation style to pandoc's style, the citation identifier it spits out isn't the BBT citation key, but some numeric item id that Zotero alone uses. :(

adamsmith

Right, that'd only work for a final conversion, not if you want to keep writing.
@emilianoeheyns may have a better idea.
FWIW, Zotero is adding a proper citekeys field, hopefully in the near future, and this will then be trivially easy

emilianoeheyns

Wouldn't this work? https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/citing/migrating/

emilianoeheyns

Oh yeah, only for a final conversion.

Paul Kelleher

@emilianoeheyns @adamsmith: wait, no, this works exactly as I wanted! Thank you!

Maybe I'm not following what "only for a final conversion means". The Better BibTeX Citekeys Zotero style that @emilianoeheyns pointed to allows me to convert "(Jones 1992, 12)" to "[@Jones1992, p. 12]", and back again. Pandoc doesn't need to be involved at all to do that conversion. Is there something I'm missing?

Anyways: thanks!

adamsmith

Yeah, I agree, this should give you all you need

emilianoeheyns

Feel free to use it any way that helps you of course :) . The way I had envisioned it was you'd run pandoc over the result to get you back to markdown - I don't see that round-tripping cleanly as an ongoing process, but that could well just be a limit to my imagination.

emilianoeheyns

BTW with BBT installed the citation key is actually in the Word doc, so pandoc could look if it's present and use that. Should be compatible with how Zotero will do it when citekey fields come to Zotero natively.

Paul Kelleher

I'm returning to this thread to ask a sort of reverse question. Suppose I want to write my first draft in plain text, but then I want to be able to move to Word and have my Zotero citekeys feature in the Word file just as they would if I had started in Word and used Zotero from within Word to add citekeys. Is there any way to convert plain text citekeys to the sort of "smart" citekeys that Zotero needs in order to operate on the citations (and create a bibliography) from within Word?

Paul Kelleher

Found exactly what I am looking for here:

https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/exporting/pandoc/index.html#from-markdown-to-zotero-live-citations