how to 'find' zotero.sqlite for a script to make 'personalized recommendations'

yourwelcome

Hello,
I've written an R script that gives 'personalized recommendations' for new journal articles by mining the information in the zotero.sqlite database. (Read more and get the working script at: http://colugos.blogspot.ca/2013/06/zotero-and-r-automatically-find.html)

However, the user currently needs to manually specify the location of their zotero database. Is there a GNU/Linux and Windows generalized way for automatically detecting the location of a users database?

In case you are interested, the 'personalized recommendations' are generated by finding new articles which are either cited-by or cite articles in your zotero database. The idea is that citation networks are a good indication of article relevancy (opposed to keyword similarities). The script I made is basically just a wrapper for SQL, JSON processing, and the Microsoft Academic Search API.

Thanks for Zotero and your contributions!
Rob

adamsmith

you're better off using the dev lists for questions like this:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/zotero-dev
There might be a more elegant way, but you can check how Qnotero does this (in python: https://github.com/smathot/qnotero/blob/master/libqnotero/preferences.py#L137 )

Simon

See my first comment at https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/zotero-dev/q0ZT9I-r9Q4 for an explanation of how Zotero Standalone does this, although the links to the specific lines in the Zotero source are a little off now.

yourwelcome

Thanks adamsmith and Simon for the tip.
It looks like Qnotero does a file search in a user's home directory by the os.name() command. In R this would be Sys.info()['sysname'] and that may work for my needs. I'll take at look at the Standalone solution now.
Thanks,
Rob