DEVONthink and Zotero

kmlawson

Hello and thanks so much to the Zotero team for the wonderful work they have done on Zotero. I wanted to share a script I created this evening to help me integrate Zotero with my notes in DEVONthink. I created an applescript to import all my Zotero entries, create a folder for each source, add a main note file for the source, and assign it tags for all the Zotero tags and collections in the original source. It will only add them to the DEVONthink Pro database only if they have not already been added before.

You can read some of my notes on this and download the script from here:

http://muninn.net/blog/2010/09/zotero-and-devonthink.html

There a lot of improvements that might be done to the script and ideally, it would somehow use a plugin or something of the like to access the Zotero API to get the data rather than querying the zotero database directly through sqlite3 shell commands. I would welcome any improvements on the script or suggestions on how that might be done, as I couldn't figure out how to do it with my amateur skills in applescript coding.

Hope someone finds it useful and perhaps picks it up and runs with it, thinking of ways to better link these two powerful research tools.

kithairon

This is great. Pondering myself how to get DT and Zotero to be better friends in my workflow, your script is a welcome way to get the two talking to each other. (Currently index with DT Zotero's storage folder – which works, albeit not gracefully).

So tried your script; it finally ran in less than a minute through my 900 bibliographical entries. What it doesn't like though are certain characters in Zotero's mainentry: double spaces in between words, spaces before punctuation marks, double apostrophies (probably a few more – though it handles non-english scripts well). After picking them out and it was a breeze. Great! Need to think more about how to make use of this more thoroughly. Thanks.
Kithairon

kmlawson

I have made some major changes/improvements to the script, which now recreates the entire hierarchy that you have in Zotero. Again read more here:

http://muninn.net/blog/2010/09/zotero-and-devonthink.html

I didn't resolve those problems with double spaces etc. though, which I unfortunately didn't get around to.

UPDATED 2010.9.15 1.5

-Now puts all sources into an "_All" folder (or whatever you call it)
-Puts a replicate of each source into a collection group corresponding to that in Zotero
-Option to not warn about Firefox
-Options to set the formatting of the name of the group and note file and its divider

kmlawson

Hello everyone, I updated this script to 1.6 to support logging of all groups and files created. The script is available at the link provided above.

kmlawson

I have completely rewritten this script, now using the Zotero server API. Much slower but the old script kept breaking as Zotero upgraded.

https://github.com/kmlawson/ZotDevon