[ZoteroBib] Import from RIS, BibTeX

zuphilip · May 16, 2018

It is already possible in ZoteroBib to export to some formats. I think it is also useful to be able to import RIS and BibTeX files (and possibly more formats).

Possible use case: Some databases show only the bibliographic metadata when you have licensed them. I can maybe access them from my university, but this does not mean that also you (resp. the translation server) can access them as well. Probably I can download the data from the database in a format like RIS or BibTeX. To use this further one would need a possibility to import these files or simply the content to ZoteroBib.

dstillman · May 16, 2018

That's a bit more advanced of a use case than we envision for ZoteroBib — I think that'd be more appropriate for the Zotero web interface. (Given how much more pleasant the ZoteroBib interface currently is, it's tempting to want to add more features, but we'd really like to keep it as simple as possible and just focus on bringing some of its ease of use back to the web library as soon as possible.)

In many cases, for items in gated databases, there'd still be a DOI or ISBN that you could use to add the item to ZoteroBib. (Unfortunately Google Scholar blocks AWS, but there might be other databases that you could try as well.)