Exporting to Excel (for scoping review)

heidewenzel · 2025-02-28T12:14:42+00:00

I'm in the planning stages of a scoping review I want to do. For the review I'll have to save all hits in a database. All the hits have to be scanned for duplicates, and those need to be removed and just title, abstract and keywords have to be exported to an excel sheet for the screening process (two persons have to screen independently). The problem is, i cant find an option to export all entries of a library but just certain fields (title, keywords, abstract) to excel?
I would (if in doubt) delete additional information by hand, but I cant even export to excel without it being a complete mess (every infomation in the first column).
Is there another way? Can anyone help

damnation · 2025-02-28T12:43:03+00:00

"every infomation in the first column"

That just means that the way you are using the .csv (comma separated values) in Excel or wherever you are not doing correctly.

When importing a .csv in Excel, make sure to choose "Delimited" here:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u452233/0o9is9wf3e1k9kfu2hdg.png

And then switch that to "comma" on the next page:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u452233/a8nzkqhvdfh763tbgzgv.png

(you can see in the preview how it already divies out the columns)

Alternatively, you can also do this within Excel. Same thing.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u452233/6afcjgdtur753mlchncg.png

(None of this has actually anything to do with Zotero. That provides the correct .csv.)

heidewenzel · 2025-03-13T19:46:45+00:00

Thank you! Exporting only the relevant information won't be possible I pressume?

adamsmith · 2025-03-13T19:50:36+00:00

You can modify the export translator pretty easily, but it does involve javascript, but it's also pretty quick to just delete what you don't need or write a post-processing script (or have an LLM write one for you) that removes all columns you don't need (and that, of course, you can then re-use).