Searching for citations in document

reg_saus

Is there a way to search a document (Word2010 in this case) for citations/references that exist only in the document and not in the library. (If it matters I use both personal and group libraries.)

And then more generally just searching the document for Zotero citations.

Sorry if this has been asked, but my searching for an hour now has returned nothing. I think the search terms are too generic.

aurimas

No, that is not currently possible, but the feature is planned in general.

And then more generally just searching the document for Zotero citations.

As opposed to things that look like citations but are not inserted by Zotero? Couldn't you just search for something like parentheses or superscripted numbers? Word has some advanced search capabilities if that's what you're looking for.

You can also press Alt+F9 and then search for ZOTERO_ITEM, but the field codes could get a bit annoying.

reg_saus

Most of our citation styles are superscripts. Most of our documents are chemistry and biology related, therefore we have more superscripts in the normal uncited text than we do citations. So the generic Word search doesn't work. The field codes contain far too much noise to be easily usable.

I suppose I could create a debugging style that cites like "ZOTERO <cite id>" and just swich back and forth. Yuck. ( So now I want a style quick change button - ;) )

Thanks for reply. Hope this feature shows up sometime.

adamsmith

I'm a bit confused what you're trying to do more generally?

reg_saus

Find citations that are in the document, but not in our library.

This happens, for one instance, when a ref gets deleted from our library. Then, someone enters another copy of that same ref again and uses it in the document. Problem is if we go edit the reference in our library (the new one), and try to refresh the bibiliography in the document, nothing happens because the old reference only exists in the document.

It would be nice to easily/quickly find these zombie refs that only live in the document, so we can replace them with the current version that lives in our library.

reg_saus

Also just highlighting the citations in the document would be a help, since there are many times we have to go through and change, or just verify, all the citations and references, and as I stated before, in our documents they are very hard to differentiate from the rest of the text.

adamsmith

You should be able to highlight citations in the document: Citations in Word are inserted as Word "Fields." There is a setting in Word to always highlight fields—depends on the Word version, but shouldn't be hard to find.

reg_saus

Generic Word features don't seem to be much help. For example in the first paragraph of our most recent grant, we have 14 field codes that Word will highlight, 2 of them are citations. That's not helpful, when searching through a large document.

I'm hoping for features that are specific to Zotero fields.

adamsmith

Sorry, doubt that's going to happen then, since Zotero need to make use of generic Word features. (though, creating a style that just puts in front of every citation is trivially easy, so if that works for you that might be a solution)

reg_saus

Still hoping for the first part of my question though. Finding citations/refs that are in the paper but not in the library.

peterhelfer

A simple way to find citations when using APA style is to search for four digits followed by a right parenthesis: [0-9]{4}\) (Advanced find with wildcards on). I get very few false positives this way, mileage may vary.

You could temporarily switch the style in Zotero doc settings to APA to search for citation.

reg_saus

Thanks peterhelfer, but it still has the same issue as above, these are highly technical papers with math, chemistry, biology. Very high number of false positives. Basically, no generic text search is going to work well. It would need to be recognized as a "Zotero" specific Word field. Thanks anyway.