Create bibliography, export citations, roadmap

cpplibrary

Greetings from the Center for Patient Partnerships at UW Madison. We are building an online archive on patient/health advocacy research and are interested in using Zotero as the citation database for our website.

One of our primary user groups are academic researchers, who will use the archive to find relevant research papers. We would like to allow these users to export citations and create bibliographies entirely through the web version of our Zotero library -- do you have an estimate of when this feature might be implemented?

We have been considering Refworks, which does have export and bibliographic creation capabilities online, but we really like the ease with which users can browse our folders in Zotero. We would be willing to live with Zotero's current limitations if we knew that the export feature was on its way soon!

We are also interested in your roadmap for the website, so that we can determine whether Zotero would meet our future needs and so we can perhaps begin planning for future enhancements to our archive.

adamsmith

We are also interested in your roadmap for the website, so that we can determine whether Zotero would meet our future needs and so we can perhaps begin planning for future enhancements to our archive.

to help the Zotero folks answer this - anything in particular you're looking/waiting for, beyond what you say above?

cpplibrary

Thanks for the quick response. I will ask the team and get back to you.

cpplibrary

We've experimented with Zotero's server API and Zotpress, and they seem to be a great way to more tightly integrate the info from our Zotero library into our own site, rather than having users switch back and forth between our site and the Zotero website.

Below are some of our questions. Let us know if we should post to the zotero-dev mailing list instead. We're still open to directing users to the Zotero website if the functionality that we're looking to offer is there, and we definitely welcome any suggestions that you might have :)

1) Does a Read API request for the set of collection in a library return the 99 most recently added articles to that collection?

2) The "format" parameter for the Read API would allow our users to export our collections in formats like RIS and BibTeX, but there is a 99 item limit within a single request. If a collection contained 200 items, would we be able to retrieve all our citations 99 items at a time, using the "start" parameter?

3) Is there a way to retrieve the abstract for each article in a collection, so that we can display the summary in addition to the bibliographic info? Perhaps by extracting the "abstractNote" class from a request like https://api.zotero.org/users/xxxxxx/items? Alternatively, we could try linking users to the article's online Zotero page, which contains the abstract.

4) The field search currently searches title and creator fields. Will this be expanded to search the abstract too?

5) Will the "bib" mode be expanded to return more than 150 items?

DWL-SDCA

Are you intending for your database to be primarily for UW use or will it be open for the web in general? If open, and offered at no cost, pease contact me. I can explain to you how I use Zotero as one of the vital parts of production for my SafetyLit database. My project started as an in-house small database 15 years later, more than 60,000 visitors conduct 150,000+ searches a week. If you are open to all, your site will be a great complement to SafetyLit. The SafetyLit inclusion criteria specifically excludes medical errors and such. SafetyLit includes patient advocacy issues such as domestic violence and child maltreatment screening. You could download those citations to your Zotero and include them in your database. SafetyLit records individually or in group are available for download from the browser address bar.

dstillman

cpplibrary: Yes, best to post API questions to zotero-dev.