Import from word-processed APA/MLA

anark

Amongst the features I'd like to see implemented as soon as possible is the ability to import word-processed APA/MLA. Is this going to come either as part of the integration with word processors or with the wider variety of supported import/export options?

Also, are there currently any scripts or apps around that would take, say, an MLA bibliography in RTF and do a reasonably good job at converting it to BibTex or any other format that Zotero currently imports from?

dnw

I have not come across any such applications. Such conversion utilities would be very difficult to make. You would need to parse the text and allocate each part to its data type. This may seem simple if you are thinking of simple one author, one book entries. But there are many far more complex reference types to deal with.

An example of one of the problems - how would you determine the record type ? ‘”Man eats Tiger” in Journal of Nutrition’' make it easy to allocate to ‘Article in Journal’ but '"Man eats Tiger” in The Bangalore Bugle’ ? Is it a magazine, newspaper, or a collection of articles?

My suggestion would just type the lot into a bibliographic application, or collect the reference titles and do library searches and collect the bibliographic data that way.

schartkoff

An interim approach would be to check out c2bib: http://www.molspaces.com/d_cb2bib-overview.php

...which will take formatted referenced copied to the clipboard and attempt to parse out the individual bibliography fields in bibtex format, from which you could then import them into Zotero.

anark

I agree that it would be very difficult to make such an application work perfectly. However, it could be very useful without being perfect.

c2bib looks promising -- thanks!

ladaniela

a very basic doubt: how do you import from your Zotero library to your word document in APA style?

adamsmith

depends on what you need. For just bibliography
http://www.zotero.org/support/creating_bibliographies

if you want all citation done by Zotero:
http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_integration

As for the original question in this thread, there is now a kb article
http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_formatted_bibliographies

edit: ladaniela - better to open a new thread, especially when the last post is almost 5 years old...

ladaniela

thanks a lot, I will try