Extract Bibliography from Document

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  • Hi, you may use Citavi to extract the Zotero formatted bibliography from a (word) document in a RIS, BibTeX or Endnote format export file. See http://tavi-iskills.blogspot.nl/2015/02/importing-references-from-word-document.html
  • For a Zotero-compatible solution Juris-M will export inaccessible references to a chosen group library to which the current user has access. The features is described here.

    Not exactly your use case, but we use this here for supervision, and it is very efficient. Students begin their project in their My Library space, and when their draft is ready, we hook it up to my account, make the settings in the document, and refresh. Items (without attachments) are created in the chosen group library, and the document is re-linked to point at them. I can then touch up citations, send the student a feedback report, and monitor progress. Would also work for collaborations.

    As noted up-thread, a more elegant solution is planned for Zotero, but in the meantime the feature extension in Juris-M is serving our needs well.
  • Solution that worked for me!

    The link below from UCSF details a process that can be adapted from endnote to Zotero. WizFolio allows coping the reference list from MS Word into WizFolio which can then be exported to a RIS file. This file can be shared or copied and pasted into Zotero via "import from clipboard' directly into a subcollection.

    Make sure to check that the references imported correctly, WizFolio got about 1 in 10 of mine wrong.

    https://blogs.library.ucsf.edu/inplainsight/2013/09/19/using-wizfolio-to-transfer-a-ms-word-bibliography-to-endnote-or-refworks/


    Hope this helps

    Note: Free WizFolio account allows only 50 references to be imported per month.
  • I created a tool, "Reference Extractor", to quickly extract embedded Zotero references from .docx Word documents. It's available at http://rintze.zelle.me/ref-extractor/. The extracted item metadata (in CSL JSON format) can be (re)imported into Zotero.

    P.S. Feedback is more than welcome, and can be given either here or at the code repository at https://github.com/rmzelle/ref-extractor.
    P.P. S. There are no privacy concerns: while it is a website, the extraction takes place entirely on your computer, and nobody has access to the Word documents you process with the tool.
  • Beautiful! Worked for me and was perfectly timed, as I needed this function now.
  • @Rintze this is a great tool, and works perfectly. One issue - is there a way to import these without duplicating them in the library? Perhaps by generating a reference to *existing* items in a library?
  • That would be something that Zotero would need to implement -- the online tool by itself won't be able to do that.
    Both document collection, i.e. sorting the items used in a given document into a separate collection in Zotero (for sure) and the ability to keep links to item when exporting and importing them (potentially) are on the map for the future, but may still be a good bit out.
  • the online tool by itself won't be able to do that.
    Actually, assuming there is a way to get the userID of the currently logged-in user (Dan, is this possible via e.g. the API?), you can trivially get a list of item IDs to screen against. See e.g. https://api.zotero.org/users/475425/items?format=keys&v=3.
  • edited March 6, 2017
    One issue - is there a way to import these without duplicating them in the library?
    Glad you could use the tool! What is the use case here, exactly? Do you have a document with embedded citations from multiple Zotero libraries (including yours), and do you want to import only the items cited from other libraries?
  • @Rintze I try the tool and it works. I don't see any error at this moment.

    Thank you very much for your job
  • I wrote a little Python utility (based on pyzotero and thus the web API) to create a clean collection from Word/docx files. It assumes all citations are in your library and doesn't duplicate any entries as a result. In case someone is finding it useful or wants to contribute:
    https://github.com/mwort/zotero_word_items_to_collection
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