Will the extractor ever be able to overwrite?

I had a discussion with Rintze Zelle about the following, & he told me that the issue had been broached some time ago but never really resolved.

I worked with an author who used Zotero, & the reference list for a document he sent me was quite long. I asked him to send me the reference file. I was able to extract using the extractor & import to my group's database in order to (I thought) correct errors in the reference list. In my environment, we need to have a Zotero reference file for each document to be able to make any changes to the text or reformat if the manuscript is submitted elsewhere. I made corrections to the author's capitalization of article & journal titles & abbreviations, updated to my group's online database, & created a new reference list in the document, which I assumed would contain my corrections.

It didn't, though, because even though I had made corrections to my group's Zotero database, when I refreshed the document & reinserted a new bibliography, the program did not overwrite the codes that had been embedded in the document when the author first inserted the citations. So extracting is useless unless what you are extracting from is pristine.

I ended up having to unlink the citations in the document I got from the author (painful) & redo using the citations from *my* database, telling the authors not to insert any more citations from their own database when doing revisions. At this point, if authors tell me they use Zotero but I see multiple errors in the reference list, I don't even bother extracting. It's easier to unlink & start from scratch, just pulling them from PubMed or wherever & making any corrections as I go, but making sure they are correct in the document the first time they are created.

(That was long, sorry.)

My question is, is there a plan to fix this? It would make the extractor functional for more than just editor-to-editor exchanges. Thanks.

  • Yes, we will be adding an additional dialog to Zotero word processor integration that will allow you to extract citations from a document and put them into your library where you can then modify them.
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