Bibliography

Juliank03
Hello

My teacher is accusing me of cheating and saying I didn't add my bibliographie via zotero, Is there a way I can see if and when my Bibliographie got added from Zotero into Word.

Thank in advance
Julian
  • adamsmith
    You can't easily tell when, no (someone with some digital forensic expertise and access to your harddisk would probably be able to tell, but this isn't something that Zotero itself timestamps or otherwise keeps track of, so it's not simple.)

    If you did insert the bibliography using the Word add-on, you can show _that_ it was created using Zotero by showing field codes: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/word_field_codes

    If it wasn't (i.e. you used "Create bibliography"), you can't technically show _that_ it was inserted using Zotero, but you can show that the items in your Zotero library create the exact same bibliography (just following the same steps again: it's actually pretty tricky to manually produce the exact same output as Zotero) and you can also show the date added and date modified times of the relevant items in your Zotero library to show when you added those.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited 26 days ago
    Please consider saving multiple sequential copies of your Word document throughout your writing process. I save-as my document about every hour. The documents don't require very much space. This, for me, is a safety/recovery precaution. If you have multiple versions you can easily show the progress to your final version. document-01.doc; document-02.doc; document-03.doc etc. For my doctoral thesis I had in excess of 200 copies/versions.

    I try to never share a version of my document with live Zotero field codes with anyone who might alter or save the document in a way that could damage the codes.

    If you have backups of your document you can share those with your teacher.

    edit
    Is this because your teacher isn't familiar with personal bibliography management software such as Zotero? You could offer to provide a report from Zotero that lists all of the relevant items from your Zotero library. Seeing all of the references with metadata and abstracts might help. https://www.zotero.org/support/reports

    edit2
    If your teacher hasn't been introduced to software like Zotero, consider scheduling a meeting and demonstrating the miracles that Zotero can perform (from capturing items from databases and publishers, storing copies of documents, inserting citations, and automatically formatting the bibliography).

    Does your teacher believe that gathering reference information without going to a library with notecards is cheating?
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