Search Zotero Library References

budinetd
Hi!

I have two Zotero libraries for a project I am working on. I want to see what citations from my first Zotero library are cited in the REFERENCES of the papers in the second library. It is very tedious to do this manually but I am not aware of a Zotero function to execute to find this.

Thanks!
  • tim820
    edited June 22, 2024
    There are some current means to extract a cited reference list from a single published PDF, but they are not perfect and require some manual checking work. Especially for the use case you describe, which requires extracting cited references from all the PDFs of an entire (group ?) library.

    Until quite recently, journal publishers did not reliably provide those reference lists for each newly-published paper to online metadata repositories like Crossref. But there are now millions of papers that Crossref does have reference list data for. So it would great if Zotero in the future extracted that data along with the other metadata it pulls from Crossref.

    Until then, the zotero-reference plugin can pull that data for a single paper from Crossref if available; or alternatively it tries to extract and parse the text of the reference list directly from a PDF (neither are perfect processes). It puts that list under a new References tab for the item (not in your library), and highlights the references that are already in your library (based on DOI match [and maybe title too?], which fails without DOIs). But then it would be up to you to check the list for each paper under its References tab for the matches to your library (there might be ways for custom code to read and auto-check the internal data files that the plugin saves those lists in, against your other library).
    https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference

    More recently, ChatGPT can create a BibTex file from a single PDF's reference list you copy/paste to it. Which can then be imported by Zotero in the usual way, to a separate collection. And then Zotero's duplicate checking would tell you which items you already have in your library. In my limited testing, the BibTex reference list created by ChatGPT can often be 100% correct, but not always.
    https://x.com/MushtaqBilalPhD/status/1753785908266963066
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