How do I stop zotero export to BibTex from using problematic non-alphanumeric characters in keys?

alexmsmartins

Hello everyone.

I am using pandoc with a bibtex file generated by zotero. But pandoc has a current limitation by which it does not process two non-alphanumeric characters in a row.

All the details are at http://stackoverflow.com/a/21000999/274789

As such I would like to know if it is possible to change Zotero's export so that when you have an item like this

@ARTICLE{pico_wikipathways:_2008,
author = {Pico, Alexander R and Kelder, Thomas and van Iersel, Martijn P and Hanspers, Kristina and Conklin, Bruce R and Evelo, Chris},
title = {{WikiPathways:} Pathway Editing for the People},
journal = {{PLoS} Biol},
year = {2008},
.......
}

it generates this key 'pico_wikipathways_2008' instead of this one 'pico_wikipathways:_2008'.

More generally, I would like to avoid keys with more than one non-alphanumeric character in a row.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

adamsmith

Two suggestions:
1. Have a look at: https://github.com/friflaj/zotero-better-bibtex which allows more customizable citekeys

2. You can modify the existing Zotero translator (found in the translator folder in your Zotero data directory: http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data ) to not use underscores between the different parts of the citekey:
https://github.com/zotero/translators/blob/master/BibTeX.js#L67

You can also modify the actual citkey generating function, but that's a bit more complex.

alexmsmartins

Hello adamsmith.

I tried zotero-better-bibtex and it works great. But a few days after I asked this question at stackoverflow, the author of pandoc released version 1.12.3.1 and the reported problem is no more.

Thanks for the suggestions and specially for the zotero plugin that makes bibtex keys easier to read and use.