Microsoft Word's built in Bibliographic Management

almclean

I'm going to describe how Zotero can be used with Microsoft Word's built in Bibliographic Management features. For two reasons:

1. To help other people who need to do this.
2. To explain why this is sometimes necessary, in order to motivate a feature request.

Zotero users are usually recommended to use Zotero's Word Processor Plugins to generate bibliographies and reference lists. However, there are situations where this is not possible:

1. In some corporate environments, although it may be possible to use Zotero on computers connected to the Internet, it may be necessary to author documents on "locked down" computers where Zotero cannot be used.
2. It may be necessary to collaborate on documents with authors who are unwilling or unable to use Zotero.

In those scenarios I have found it useful to use Zotero to manage a bibliographic database and then transfer the data into Word's, rather limited, bibliographic management system.

The approach I have taken is to export the relevant bibliographic data from Zotero into the BibTeX format. This can then be converted into the "Word 2007 bibliography format" using bibutils.

This is a two stage process:

1. bib2xml converts the BibTeX into MODS XML format
2. xml2wordbib converts the MODS XML format to the XML format used by Word.

The resulting Word XML file can be read directly by the Word Bibliographic management software.

I tried directly exporting the MODS XML format from Zotero, but the two stage approach described seems to result in more useful conversions.

Also, Windows binary releases of recent bibutils versions do not appear to be readily available on the Internet. Although compiling the software with mingw-w64 running under msys2 was straightforward once the relevant tools were in place, this will be a significant barrier to using these tools for many users.

Finally we come to the feature request.

It would be really helpful if Zotero was able to directly export its database to the Microsoft Word XML Bibliography format. This would avoid the need to perform any file format conversions with bibutils and should result in more useful conversions.

adamsmith

Is the Word format documented decently anywhere? My interest in reverse-engineering a rarely-used XML format is, uhm, limited.

almclean

I think the required information is to be found in

ECMA-376, 4th Edition: Office Open XML File Formats — Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference, Section 22.6, pp 3733-3769.

which is found in:

ECMA-376 4th edition Part 1

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm

Attempts to understand the format that predate that publication can be found here:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff838340.aspx

https://mahbub.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/deciphering-microsoft-office-2007-bibliography-format/

https://mahbub.wordpress.com/2007/03/24/details-of-microsoft-office-2007-bibliographic-format-compared-to-bibtex/

adamsmith

The ECMA documentation actually defines docx, but mahbub's blog helps. (MSDN not so much. You'd imagine at least for a schema to exist...)

mtmelissa

Hi, I am looking to do the exact same thing as the original post (I do not have access to zotero on my professionnal computer, and I would like to use Word's built in bibliography) This post is 6 years old, is anyone aware of a better solution to this problem ? Thanks

dstillman

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/92524/zotero-and-office-xml