How do I generate/output a list of all authors in my library?

sudoeric

I want to export a list of every single author, editor, etc., that exists in my library. I don't care about style or what they wrote, I just want a gigantic list of every single author. How can I do this?

(For the curious, I want to go through and clean out my author list manually, renaming e.g., all instances of "Obama, BH" and "Obama, B.H." to my preferred "Obama, Barack H." The list, which I hope to import into Excel, is to help me facilitate this.)

dstillman

You can do this easily by running the following SQL query on the Zotero database (zotero.sqlite in your Zotero data directory:

SELECT DISTINCT lastName, firstName FROM creatorData;
You'll have to figure out the best SQLite client for your use. (You can use the official SQLite command-line client if you know how — that has a tab-separated-values mode.) You'll need to close Zotero (or Firefox, for Zotero for Firefox) first before accessing the database, since Zotero locks it.

dstillman

Also, that'd be for all libraries in your database. To limit to your personal library, go with this:

SELECT DISTINCT lastName, firstName FROM creatorData
NATURAL JOIN creators WHERE libraryID IS NULL;
(Also, just to note for posterity, these queries will need to change for Zotero 5.0, though Zotero will at some point gain batch-editing functionality and possibly a creators view, both of which would help address your use case.)

LiborA

Maybe you are not familiar with SQL, then you can use http://sqlitebrowser.org/ and export creatorData table to the CSV file and work with this data in your spreadsheet (Excel and so on).

zuphilip

I would like to express that I think that the use case here would be very useful to support in Zotero directly (or with a plugin).

It is common that the same author, organization, journal name will be written different in different sources and it is actually part of a good citation work to "standardize" these different writings. Therefore, it would be useful to have a possibility (similar to duplicated items) to create some lists (e.g. of all authors) and then allow easy merging (batch editing the corresponding entries in the background).

Here is a screenshot of how this could look like: http://www.citavi.com/sub/manual5/de/101_managing_lists-6.png

What do you think about this, Dan et al.?

dstillman

Yes, that's what I was alluding to above.

sudoeric

That's awesome news, thanks. I haven't pulled the list from the SQL database yet as I still have a small handful of papers to go through/audit/read but it seems easy enough to do.

fabioqueda

Does anyone know if the suggestion from zuphilip has been given any attention. This feature would really help people like us that are trying to use Zotero to support systematic literature reviews.