Feature request: A Mendeley import function which works

jdallen

Hi,

I don't know if Zotero devs monitor this forum, but just wanted to say that the lack of a proper Mendeley import function is the only thing preventing me from making the switch to Zotero. I'd like to suggest that this feature is added to Zotero.

A basic import pathway exists (exporting in RIS format from Mendeley then importing that into Zotero) but this does not retain the folder structure from Mendeley, which for me is a show-stopper. The whole point of me using Mendeley or Zotero is to help me categorise the hundreds of references I have curated. The only alternatives I can find are some 3rd party scripts (https://github.com/rdiaz02/Adios_Mendeley, https://github.com/flinz/mendeley2zotero) however I'd rather not let some random haven't-been-updated-in-years scripts mess around with my carefully curated collections.

Any advice?

adamsmith

Devs read this and it's an understandable request, but I don't think it's going to happen from the core dev side any time soon. Edit: though I might be wrong about that? See below.

FWIW, the 3rd party scripts wouldn't touch your Mendeley database directly but rather create a copy for import to Zotero, so you could just test it out

emilianoeheyns

It should be possible to have either one of those two projects dump out a format that can be read cleanly by BBT; one the the import-export translators that's included ("BetterBibTeX JSON") is designed for as lossless import as is possible (importers can't import the timestamps for example), mostly for the purpose of my own testing and debugging. The format is not documented, but you can export existing references to see how to populate the field and collections in the JSON file. They're mostly just dumps of the objects that Zotero hands exporters, with some cleanup.

It's not perfect but it would save you from fiddling with the Zotero DB directly (as Mendeley2Zotero does) and it can import collections, and as the format is JSON a) it's pretty easy to generate, b) no need to go through bibtex (export to bibtex and then import to Zotero is not lossless).

dstillman

We're aware of the demand here. Stay tuned.

jdallen

Thanks all for your input. Mendeley is working (just about) for me, so at the moment it sounds like the time it would take to manually test scripts and figure out various import/export formats just isn't worth the effort. I'd rather spend the time on actual work! I'll wait and keep my fingers crossed for official Zotero support for importing Mendeley folders. It feels like an obvious marketing strategy for Zotero to make it as easy as possible for Mendeley users to switch over so hopefully this will happen.