Migrating from Papers2

thorowitz

Does anyone have any experience in migrating from Papers2 to Zotero on Windows? I tried exporting my reference library as a bibtext file, but Zotero only imported the references, not the pdfs.
I read a previous post that advised someone migrating from an earlier version of papers, but the instructions included specific commands in vi, which is not available on my windows machine.

aurimas

Could you post a bibtex entry that has an associated pdf?

thorowitz

<code>@article{KAPTEIN:1995p2,
author = {NA KAPTEIN and Jan Theeuwes and A van der HEIJDEN},
title = {SEARCH FOR A CONJUNCTIVELY DEFINED TARGET CAN BE SELECTIVELY LIMITED TO A COLOR-DEFINED SUBSET OF {\ldots}},
year = {1995},
month = feb,
journal = {Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance},
abstract = {SEARCH FOR A CONJUNCTIVELY DEFINED TARGET CAN BE SELECTIVELY LIMITED TO A COLOR-DEFINED SUBSET OF ELEMENTS. NA KAPTEIN, J THEEUWES, AHC VAN DER HEIJDEN Journal of experimental psychology. Human },
url = {http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN{\&}cpsidt=11163592},
path = {C:/Users/horowitzts/Documents/Papers2/KAPTEIN/KAPTEIN 1995 Journal of Experimental Psycholog.pdf},
}
</code>

adamsmith

I'll let aurimas do the heavy lifting here since he actually runs Windows, but briefly: the problem here is Zotero's inability to deal with the colon in C:/ (which we need to fix) - so the workaround would be to place the bibtex file in the Papers2 repo and do a search search and replace for the first chunk of the filepath. You can try this yourself or wait for aurimas to have specifics.

aurimas

Well, the short answer is that Papers2 does not output valid BibTeX.

The path field is not an official BibTeX field, so we don't really support it. It should be either "file" or "pdf". In your case, "pdf" would work best, but only if all the files you are importing are actually PDFs. If you change it to "file", the colon in the file path does introduce a problem. (@adamsmith, I can't find much documentation on the "file" field syntax, so I'm not sure if we can even avoid this)

So, if you want an immediate fix, you can just do a search and replace on your BibTeX file. Search for "path =" and replace it with "pdf =".

@adamsmith, I think we can add "path" field for compatibility with Papers2 and make is synonymous with "pdf"

aurimas

Added path as an alternative to pdf on import. If it's not working, try updating your translators via Preferences... -> General -> Update Now

If that still doesn't fix it, let us know.

jdidion

I realize this is an old topic, but I just want to let people know about a new python library and command-line application for exporting publications from the Papers2 database directly to Zotero: https://github.com/jdidion/papers2

lostrack621

Edited because I am a total idiot and these instructions work AS LONG AS I'm on the same computer. (You'd think I would be smart like that but nope, not when I'm tired...). Thank you so much, folks, for starting this discussion!

jiversen

Hi, I wanted to share my appreciation for this thread. The topic is way old by now and probably of interest to a vanishing set of people but it was a lifesaver and I must share my thanks as well as report on some updates...

I have kept papers2 going until recently. Why? It was the only system that let me manage my PDF storage totally openly and how I wanted (like Zotero and Zotfile, I now know!). it was time to switch but none of the exports were working smoothly into zotero. I was contemplating writing a db to db exporter and was so lucky to find this thread and the amazing work of @jdidion.

An updated and expanded version of their work is here: https://github.com/jiversen/papers2

Besides updating it to python3 there are some enhancements to the conversion from papers to zotero as well as support for creating linked PDFs and back-end copies on Google Drive.

All is good. Thanks, and thanks to Zotero.