export zotero bibliography from google docs to bibtex

jtackm

I'm working on a document in google docs for easier collaboration, but would later like to convert it into a latex version, which requires exporting the google docs bibliography as bibtex. Is there currently a way of doing this?

bwiernik

I recommend you use the BetterBibTeX plugin and insert BibTeX citation placeholders in Google Docs, rather than using the Zotero Google Docs plugin.

emilianoeheyns

If you already have an existing document with references, there may be a way, but it's not very user friendly.

If Zotero can in some way export a google doc with references to a Word doc with references (either directly, or maybe using a CSL style which outputs ODF-scan markers and then using ODF scan), you can use this facility in BetterBibTeX to put the cite keys in your word document; you could then use Writer2LaTeX or AbiWord to save the resulting doc to LaTeX.

Even this would mean a fair amount of touchup work after this all is done, so I'm not entirely sure you're saving time against just saving the whole thing to plain-text and doing the markup from scratch. If you set the reference style in GDocs to something that's easy to search for (like *ptooey* IEEE style), it should be easy to search-and-replace your way out of redoing too much of the reference work.

adamsmith

Zotero can't unfortunately currently convert from Google Doc to (active) Word doc (not via ODF scan either since citation styles don't have access to internal item IDs), so what Emiliano suggests won't work.

I think the best way to go might be to use the bibtex citation style, although that is not very good... https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=id:bibtex

jtackm

Thanks a lot for the responses everyone. I will try the bibtex citation style, otherwise do it from scratch with suitable reference style + search-and-replace. Anyways, despite this (and some performance issues I found as the document grew), I wanna say a big thank you to the devs for making this plugin, I found it very helpful!

emilianoeheyns

Anystyle.io might also be able to help.

kwamepr

necro post but I ran in to this same problem and fixed up the bibtex citation style to help with this. It wraps citations with \cite{...} and separates multiline citations by comma (not underscore). The bibliography section in Google docs is in bibtex format can be copied over.

See: https://github.com/robinsonkwame/bibtex_zotero_citation_style/tree/main

dstillman

Just to note, these days it's possible to move documents from Google Docs to Word or LibreOffice. Depending on what you're actually trying to accomplish, you may get better results doing that and then using Reference Extractor to extract the actual metadata from the Word/LibreOffice document.