Mendeley citation/field code compatibility in Word?

bann.sfa

I have several word documents with Mendeley fields/citations but wish to migrate to Zotero. I've trialled reprocessing these documents with Zotero (having migrated my reference library) and Zotero recognises the Mendeley fields/citations within the document and reprocesses the bibliography correctly - all the references match up.

Can one of the developers please tell me if Zotero will have amended the field codes to Zotero format or even if there is a difference in code for this to be necessary?

Is it now safe to add further citations to the same documents with Zotero and discard Mendeley? I'm hoping to avoid manually re-inserting every citation in every document with Zotero? Zotero does seem to enable editing of the Mendeley inserted citations etc. so it seems re-inserting them would be unnecessary?

Mendeley v1.17.10
Zotero 5.0.8
Mac OS X Sierra/El Capitan
Word 2016

Thanks.

adomasven

Zotero and Mendeley citations should be compatible, however, note that the technical link between these citations in Zotero and the doc is actually lost. The citation metadata is stored within the document, so if you amend metadata (i.e. authors, date, etc) in Zotero for citations inserted with Mendeley, Zotero will not be able to update those in the doc and to restore the link you will have to reinsert them.

In fact you might be better off in finishing the documents you intend to submit for publication with Mendeley, before doing a full switch to Zotero.

bann.sfa

Ok that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

Rintze

@adomasven, when I made http://rintze.zelle.me/ref-extractor/, one of the features I couldn't get to work was for Zotero to match up extracted references imported through CSL JSON with their 'live' citations in the original Word document. That would eliminate the need to re-insert citations after import.

Is this something you would consider supporting for a third-party tool like mine? If I recall, there were some plans to make document-specific collections in Zotero proper, which presumably would support import of yet-unknown citations, but in the meantime I'm interested.

Both Zotero and Mendeley citations have a "uris" field (see https://github.com/rmzelle/ref-extractor/wiki), but it seems like this information gets lost in Zotero on import of extracted CSL JSON. I haven't dug through the code to see how things work exactly, but maybe you know.

adomasven

The Zotero URIs are dependent on item key. New item keys are generated for items when they are imported into Zotero, which is why the link isn't restored (and it couldn't be any other way, because if you tried to import 2 items with the same key and different metadata, you would get an import conflict, which we would rather not).

If I recall, there were some plans to make document-specific collections in Zotero proper, which presumably would support import of yet-unknown citations, but in the meantime I'm interested.

We'll certainly do this at some point and yes, support of embedded item import into library would happen too.