Citations will not save to folder, keeps creating new folders

KGroesbeck

I have been importing citations into Zotero Standalone, but each time that I attempt to import and save the citation to the folder I have highlighted, the program just creates a whole new folder for the citation. Then I have to delete the folder, and take the citation out of the "unfiled" folder and then put it in the correct folder. Please tell me how to get it to just place the citation in the correct folder the first time!

dstillman

How exactly are you importing? Importing a file will always create a new collection, by design, because the alternative would risk creating a mess of your library. If you use Import from Clipboard from the gear menu, it will import into the currently selected. But I'm not clear why you're repeatedly using the import feature — that's generally something you would do initially, to import a library once from another reference manager. If you're doing that repeatedly after the fact, there's a good chance you're doing something wrong.

Mike300

Have same problem. I was using jstor on a campus computer, so exported citations as *.ris to my thumb drive. Now home & trying to import with same results as OP above. Stillman's recommendation is no help. I copy the *.ris file and try to "import from clipboard" to my selected collection, but all I get is an error message. How do I get these RIS's into the correct collections?

adamsmith

So importing works but import from clipboard doesn't? Am I understanding that correctly? That would be very strange. It uses exactly the same function in Zotero.

Can you run us through exactly, step-by-step, what you're doing when using import from clipboard?

aurimas

Sounds like you're copying the file to clipboard, rather than the contents of the file and trying to "Import from Clipboard". The former won't work (though technically, it could). Use the "Import..." option instead.

Mike300

> Sounds like you're copying the file to clipboard

Yes, that's what I was doing. Didn't know I needed to actually open the file in a text editor first. Not a very user-friendly process...and "Import..." is not an option because as OP noted, it won't put the reference into the collection you want (i.e. currently have selected). Instead, "Import..." creates a brand-spankin'-new top-level collection. So it's essentially useless. Might as well eliminate the feature. It doesn't much help to move the references once in zotero because then you have to clean up after the orginal importation (delete the newly created collection), so it's still an extra step.

So, again, useless--unless I'm missing something. I'd really like to be missing something, because I've got over a hundred of these citations to import. I do not want to have to open each RIS file in a text editor, copy the danged thing, and only after all that use "Import from Clipboard". Not a hundred freaking times, especially when a lot of them will go into the same collection.

aurimas

The only thing you're missing is that this is not a typical workflow for a Zotero user. Very rarely should you need to import metadata files.

You can concatenate all the RIS files into one and import once. The best way to do this will depend on the OS you are using.

Mike300

Concatenate in text form? Do you mean via a word-processing program, in which the text from several RIS files are placed together in just a single RIS, separated by a multiple hard returns?

That would definitely save some time, since presumably at least all those references would be saved in the same subcollection, correct?

adamsmith

Concatenate in text form? Do you mean via a word-processing program, in which the text from several RIS files are placed together in just a single RIS, separated by a multiple hard returns?

yes, that exactly (though you'd want to make sure to use a text editor in plain text mode--like Notepad++ or TextEdit--and not a word processor like Word/Pages/LibreOffice.) Depending on your scripting abilites, it would also not be hard to write a shell script that takes all RIS files in a given folder an concatenates them into a single file.

dstillman

You could do this easily with a single command from the command line. The exact command depends on your OS.

Mike300

Awesome. I can take it from there. Time to get out the ol' DOS documentation...though some of it doesn't port over to windows (7).