Can't copy/paste citations within citation editor / dialog box

mebbert
Hello,

At times, I have an existing multi-item citation (e.g. [A; B; C; D]) and want to add some or all of those to another existing citation (e.g., [E; F]) without adding them manually. I'd like to be able to copy/paste them in the citation editor itself. I think this was possible on earlier versions?

So, just to restate: it would be great if citation items in the citation editor could be multi-selected and copied to then be pasted into the citation editor of another existing citation.

Thanks!
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited yesterday at 5:35pm
    We can check, but I'd be surprised if this was ever possible before. We would've had to have gone out of our way to support it, and copying bubbles, closing the dialog, opening another dialog, and then pasting seems pretty awkward and circuitous.

    Note that you can copy the citation itself — in the word processor document — to duplicate it and then use Add/Edit Citation on the new one to add/remove citations. Maybe that's what you're remembering? (That doesn't help if the second citation already exists, though.)
  • adamsmith
    I don't think this has ever been possible, no, and it'd be pretty tricky to do given how the clipboard works.

    Note that what you _can_ do is take advantage of the fact that Zotero merges adjacent citations. So if you have (A; B; C) in one space in a document and (D; E) in another space, cutting (or copying) and pasting (A; B; C) immediatel next to (D; E) and pressing "Refresh" will create (D; E; A; B; C) (sorted in the order determined by the citation style if any).
  • mebbert
    Hello,

    Thanks for the response. I must be misremembering. I hadn't used Zotero since ~2017 until this year because I really liked "the artist formerly known as SciWheel" (which has gone through several strange transitions so I abandoned it). But Zotero has always been there for me in my greatest need. :-)

    @dstillman: I think being able to copy/paste—even if awkward—would be much more convenient than having to bounce between the fields to see the list in the first so I can manually add them one at a time to the second. Doing that is what prompted this request.

    @adamsmith: I didn't try refresh. Master (ChatGPT) almost got me there. He said to put them side-by-side and then hit add/edit citation. So close. Will have to try that next time. That's super convenient.

    I still think it would be helpful to be able to copy from the dialog. e.g., suppose I know there is only one or two I'd like to move over but I don't remember the author/title, etc. It'd be nice to be able to copy just those out. But I've never interacted with the clipboard programmatically, so I can't speak to how difficult that'd be. It sounded like a simple request. "Just copy it." :-)

    Anyway, thanks for your help!
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