creating new import format for Zotero from an Access database

pamelaoliver

We have 10,000 news articles stored in an Access database. For a small subset, we will want to cite them. We can extract publication, headline/title, publication date from our database into xml, csv or possibly other formats. Is there an easy way to format this for import into Zotero?

aborel

The best bet is probably to transform the content of your database to one of these formats:
- RIS
- Bibtex

See https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/data_formats for other options. This will certainly involve a bit of scripting as Access will not know about these formats out of the box, but thousands of references are worth the (not so awful) effort. If you give more details about your database and familiarity with scripting, we could offer more specific guidance.

pamelaoliver

In case anybody else wants to know, this turned out to be pretty simple to solve. It is not at all desirable in my application to convert the entire database to RIS. Only a small fraction of the 10,000 articles will ever be cited in a paper. A minor formatting detail was the main impediment.

How it worked: (1) Wikipedia and other sources including the EndNote website have charts showing the RIS codes for various fields. (2) The only thing that was difficult is recognizing that the standard format which is (as an example)
TI - title
has TWO spaces between the two-letter code and the hyphen, not one. Also some sources called the hyphen a dash, which is a quite different character and not part of a standard keyboard, but it is a hyphen. (3) I exported the subset of desired citations in a standard database format, one row per citation, one column per relevant field. (4) I wrote a simple little program that reshaped the data into a RIS file, which has one row per field and simple syntax rules marking the beginning and end of a record. (TY document type must be the first row and ER end of record the last row.) Once I overcame the two space problem, everything worked fine. In experimenting, I learned that Zotero would not recognize our database article ID in a custom field, but it did recognize it using the code for Accession Number.

pamelaoliver

Whoops, inadequate documentation in the above. I exported the file from Access into Stata. You could also export to Excel or any other simple data file layout. I wrote my program in Stata because that is what I use, but the program is so simple it could be written in a lot of different languages using a lot of different approaches to turning the rows of citation information into rows of fields.