Combine Word reference manager and Zotero citations?

JennK

Hi all,
I have a large document with well over 100 references listed in the bibliography, which was created using Word's reference manager (yes, I manually input the information for every reference into the citation manager!).

Now, because I am trying to work more efficiently, I am using Zotero. At the end, I want to be able to create an updated bibliography that includes the references from the Word citation manager, as well as additional sources I add to the document using Zotero citations.

Any ideas of how to do this efficiently? The only way I can think of is to create a separate Zotero bibliography, then cut and paste the sources one-by-one into the Word-generated bibliography (because the sources need to be in alphabetical order). But clearly this is not efficient. Anyone have suggestions?

bwiernik

You can create separate bibliographies, then at the end convert both to plain text (not fields), and use the Sort function in Word to alphabetize them.

Note that you will have to carefully check for duplicate references in the Word and Zotero generated bibliographies and also note that disambiguation (2016a, 2016b, etc.) obviously won’t be maintained across the two tools.

adamsmith

(We should probably go through the trouble and write an import script for the Word Bibliography XML, even though it's annoying)

JennK

Thanks, @bwiernik. I didn't think of using the sort function in Word. That will at least help make it a little less tedious.
Unless, of course, @adamsmith decides to write the code....(maybe??)

bwiernik

(It would save me the effort of posting instructions on converting the Word bibliography to BibTeX every time this is asked. ;-) )

@JennK A script probably wouldn’t fully help you here, because it still wouldn’t covert the Word citations into Zotero citations, so you would still have separate bibliographies to work with (unless you wanted to manually change each reference over).