Delete multiple empty collections at once?

DWL-SDCA

I have many empty collections from importing BibTex files and then moving the imported records to the appropriate collection. I let about 50 of these build up and it is painfully tedious to delete them one-by-one. Is there a way to eliminate multiple empty collections at once? I tried to select multiple collections for deletion but I could not.

Earlier versions of Zotero allowed me to import a file directly into a collection but this very useful feature seems to have been eliminated when syncing and group functions were added.

dstillman

Is there a way to eliminate multiple empty collections at once?

No, there's no way to do that at the moment (short of using SQLite directly).

Earlier versions of Zotero allowed me to import a file directly into a collection

No they didn't.

DWL-SDCA

Thank you for the quick reply. If I had more collections I would use SQLite.

I guess that I must be thinking of direct import of RIS files. Are there plans to allow direct import of BibTex?

dstillman

I suspect that BibTeX tends to be served with a particular content type (MIME type) a lot less than RIS, and Zotero uses the content type to determine whether to import the incoming response.

We could go by extension, but it's really the type that determines how files should be handled on the web. And otherwise we'd be left inspecting every text file, which we don't want to do for performance reasons.

But if people can demonstrate that a significant portion of BibTeX files are served with a specific content type (e.g., application/x-bibtex), we could consider that.

DWL-SDCA

ScienceDirect exports with content type: text/x-bibtex. There are a couple of problems with the export/import into Zotero. Science Direct uses double-quotes to demarcate the title, abstract, etc. containers. If the article title or abstract contains a quotation mark the text after the quotation mark is dropped. Pagination usually has a space before and after the hyphen but not always before or always after. The DOI field usually contains "doi:" "doi-" or "doi" before the real doi string.

I can provide information about other publishers BibTex output if you are interested. Some use doubled or repeated curly-brackets as containers.

dstillman

There's a translator for ScienceDirect. If there are problems in the BibTeX, they can be fixed in the translator. That wouldn't be possible with direct BibTeX import.

Direct import is intended only for sites that don't have translators.

DWL-SDCA

The Science Direct translator doesn't work for me. Zotero gives me the generic "An error occurred while saving this item. Check known translator issues...". That is why I use BibTex for Science Direct. I would _love_ to have a working Science Direct translator!!

Even with the need to edit the BibTex file it is easier to do than to export in RIS format and have that come into Zotero. The RIS format import omits the article abstract.

mark

ScienceDirect does work for me. Can you give an example of a URL that doesn't work?

dstillman

I believe the ScienceDirect issues on the known translator issues page still apply.