Batch copy/paste

Gracile

I know that batch editing is a planned feature and there are many topics on this question.

My request is however slightly different: I'd like to be able to shift the content of a field to another field automatically.

You might ask "why?", here is an example: before Zotero 2.0, there was no field for number of pages. Thus I saved this information in the number of volumes field. As I've more than 300 items in zotero, it's tedious to copy/paste manually all this. If I could ask zotero to shift the data saved in number of volumes to number of pages, I'd save time!

There are many other applications... e.g. as a legal scholar, I'm now saving some data in non-orthodox zotero field since there is no better field/solution now (I'm thinking, for instance, about what is called "parallel citations").

Is it possible ATM? Could it be?
Thank you!

mronkko

Not from Zotero user interface. If you want to do this kind of batch editing, you can do this by opening the Zotero database in directly with e.g. with this add on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5817 and then edit the database directly.

This requires some understanding of SQL, but if you know it, it should not be too hard.

Gracile

Thank you! I will have a look on that. I thought I read somewhere that it was not possible to *edit* the zotero db with an external program...

Bionatsci

I not sure about this but it is probably a good idea, potentially a very good idea, to close firefox before you get into editing the zotero database directly. Otherwise you might get database corruption from two programs trying to access the database simultaneously. If you use the add-on mronkko suggested to access the database you will probably want to install it in a new firefox profile to avoid this problem.

P.S. More technically informed users might correct me on this, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

P.P.S Make very sure you backup your database before attempting to edit it directly, direct editing is not that difficult, but if you make a typo you do risk totally destroying your database (not a problem if you have a backup to restore from).