Citation keys change from Mendeley to Zotero

maxjk

After importing my Mendeley database into Zotero, I added the Zotero bibliography to my Overleaf in the hopes that I could continue without interruption. However, it appears that Zotero puts the citation keys that Latex uses (e.g., \cite{wenger1998}) in a field called "extra" which now shows "Citation Key: wenger1998". Zotero creates their own citation key wenger_communities_1998. I am in the middle of writing my PhD thesis, and manually going through all the references in my written chapters in Overleaf is not ideal.

Is there a way to preserve the Mendeley citation keys?

bwiernik

Install the BetterBibTeX plugin and indicate you already have citation keys.

@emilianoeheyns Does BBT recognize Citation Key: or only citekey: ? Can it be made flexible enough to accommodate Mendeley imports?

emilianoeheyns

It currently only recognizes "bibtex: citekey", but it's trivial to add. If someone opens an issue on github I can make the change.

emilianoeheyns

Who places the "Citation Key:" in the extra? Is this Zotero? Is this going to be the standard?

emilianoeheyns

In the Zotero source I only see "citationKey" (lowercase c, no space)

adamsmith

I think it's what Zotero does during its auto-import from Mendeley, but I don't know why.

maxjk

Thanks for the quick replies! I have installed BBT and for now manually mimicked Mendeley's behaviour by setting the citation key format to [auth:lower][year]

The next step is to get Overleaf to see the BBT citation keys, I will fiddle around and update you on the progress.

Zotero puts Mendeley's citation key in the extra field, probably to preserve the info while not overriding their own preferred citation key system?

emilianoeheyns

I'd venture to guess that Mendeley (which I don't use) has a citekey field that Zotero wishes to preserve on import, and there's no other place for it currently than the "extra" field. But the only think I can find in the zotero source for mendeley import is "citationKey", not "Citation Key".

emilianoeheyns

(for BBT you don't necessarily need to indicate that you have existing keys -- cite keys in the extra field will always take precedence. The "I have existing keys" should actually be "I have auto-generated keys using the default pattern from another/previous install", but that's a bit long)

emilianoeheyns

@maxjk can you join us at https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex/issues/1020 ?

Overleaf + BBT can be done but it takes a little setup: https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/push-and-pull/#git-support

bwiernik

@emilianoeheyns Zotero post-processes Mendeley's camelCase fields into "Title Case"-formatted fields:
https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/2939b3ae95c520432b14f9674429d713db1aa70f/chrome/content/zotero/import/mendeley/mendeleyImport.js#L677

In general, @dstillman prefers Field Name: Value as the formatting for variables in Extra.

emilianoeheyns

this doesn't follow translations I hope? Only English?

bwiernik

No, only in English.

emilianoeheyns

Done.

emilianoeheyns

@maxjk currently the only way to get your old keys into overleaf using zotero is using bbt + git.