Help! Hundreds of plain-text citations in word.

SaritaPhD

Sigh. I just received a word document from my collaborator who is new to citation managers, and it contains more than 400 APA format in-text citations. Much to my chagrin, I discovered that NONE of the citations are "active". She does actually have a Zotero plugin for word, and has references in our collection in Zotero, but she was under the impression that Zotero would basically "read" the plain-text APA-style citations and produce a bibliography from that.

There's lots of writing and editing to do, and I shudder to think of how that Works Cited section will have to come together. How can I avoid manually inserting the citations through the whole document? Maybe I can somehow "scan" this document in word (or scrivener) and convert these plain-text citations into BibTex, Scannable Cite, ODF, RTF, or any other format that would make them "live"?

dstillman

See Importing Formatted Bibliographies.

bwiernik

Given that you have the in-text citations and not the bibliography, the link that dstillman gave isn’t really relevant.

You could try to use Zotero’s RTF Scan feature to add the bibliography:
https://www.zotero.org/support/rtf_scan

Find and replace in your document to replace ( and ) with, { and } respectively, save it as a .rtf file, and then add {Bibliography} where you want the bibliography to appear.

RTF Scan doesn’t create live Zotero citations—it just formats a document according to selected style. You might have to resolve ambiguous citations.

SaritaPhD

Thank you so much for the idea, bwiernik! Replacing parentheses with brackets was very easy to do, and the scan worked reasonably well for most of my references.

However, if anyone else runs into this issue in the future, let it be known that it wasn't a great option for cases where two or more references had the same authors and years because, as bwiernik mentioned, of the ambiguity involved . Some other limitations that you should be aware of:

1. Typos in the manually entered citations that ended up in the Works Cited Section. This wouldn't have happened with an active citation (unless the reference in Zotero's database was itself incorrect).
2. Repeated citations that ought to have appeared with an "et al" (as per APA rules) listed every author each time.
3. In a file with that many references it took forever to scan (at one point I just left it running and went to bed, so I can't really say exactly how long it took).

In the end, we are settling on the manual copy/paste option. I am very lucky because my cousin, a bored middle schooler on summer break with an unusually keen interest in developing her academic skills, is kindly doing that it for me. So the best solution, if you can manage it, is to find someone willing and able to do tedious work assiduously.