Quick Way to Match My Sources?

markpav

Hi there. I've written a book, but because of a variety of reasons I ended up being way too disorganized with my references and their attributions. I have the completed book and a matching bibliography of sources for each chapter. The bibliography sources are cited in Chicago style and include links to each source.

What I don't have are any specific attributions throughout the book referencing my sources for each claim I make.

Is there a fast way to go through my sources to match the right ones to the statements in my book? Or basically, any other way than re-researching everything to find where I drew my info from?

Thanks.

bwiernik

If all of the sources for each chapter are in your Zotero library, you might be able to use the full text search (choose "Everything" in the search field) to search for the relevant phrases. Beyond that, I don't think there is any easy way to add citations based solely on concepts.

markpav

Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately, I don't have all my sources in Zotero. What I have is a big list of references like this one:

Conder, Robert L., and Alanna A. Conder. "Heart Rate Variability Interventions for Concussion and Rehabilitation." Frontiers in Psychology 5 (August 13, 2014). PMC. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00890.

Can I somehow import these text/url entries into Zotero?

adamsmith

If all or most of them have DOIs then yes -- you can just import the DOIs using the search by identifier tool (the "magic wand") (you'd ideally want a list with each DOI on a separate line, though spaces should work too.)

markpav

Thanks, Adam! That's still a lot of copying and pasting, though. I found a nifty looking script called Ref2Ris that converts whole documents to .ris files, except it isn't compatible with the latest OS. But something like that would save me a lot of time, so I'm hopeful there's another option out there.

adamsmith

We have a compilation of tools here: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_formatted_bibliographies

The last one of those works best for me, but I'd still go through the DOIs:
The time you spend cutting and pasting (and you could probably avoid that with a good text editor, btw.) you'll save on fixing up low-quality imported data if you parse the bibliography otherwise.

markpav

Oh, cool! I hadn't seen those. Thanks!

Fair enough about the time spent, too.