Convert series editors to regular editors after import

rikvosters

Hi everyone,

I just recently started using Zotero as my main tool for references, after I imported my entire library (ca. 1500 refs) from Bookends quite a while ago already. Most of that went alright, although I had to do some corrections here and there.

One annoying problem I still face is the following: in books with several editors, Zotero has kept the first 'editor' as an 'editor', but any subsequent 2nd, 3rd, … 'editors' have all been converted to 'series editors'.

I would like to know if there is an automated way to change all of those 'series editors' back to regular 'editors'. I think I hardly ever have real 'series editors' in my references, so converting all 'series editors' to regular 'editors' would work fine.

I can't find even a way to extract all of the works that have series editors with the built-in advanced search function in Zotero, but I'm hoping that someone could give me some pointers on how to proceed.

Thanks!

adamsmith

I don't, unfortunately, see a good way of doing this. You're correct that advanced search doesn't let you specify the creator type and even if it did, there are no batch changes.

This could be done in general with the javascript API:
https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/client_coding/javascript_api#examplebatch_editing
but the example will not transfer neatly to creators, so if you don't have any javascript experience, I don't think you have much of a chance there. (FWIW, this was almost certainly a bug in Bookends's export--Zotero wouldn't import the same creator type differently).

aurimas

But, out of curiosity and if you recall, what format did you use to transfer from Bookends?

rikvosters

Thanks. Pity there is no better search function, or a search and replace function for that matter.

I don't recall for sure which format I used... I tried several, and I think it might have ended up being RIS, but I'm really not sure anymore. (I remember even trying to port it via endnote).