CSV Export of References corrupted?

sfglio

I was looking for a reasonable workflow to use zotero for organizing/preparing references for a meta-analysis...and I came across a useful video/screencast (https://libguides.libraries.wsu.edu/c.php?g=768677&p=5514212).

However, if I export my ref as proposed in this video, I have all the title-information (Key,"Item Type","Publication Year","Author","Title","Publication Title","ISBN","ISSN","DOI","Url","Abstract Note","Date","Date Added","Date Modified","Access Date","Pages","Num) in one cell.
However the reference itself is split in a confusing way meaning that the first author is in the cell with the zotero DIR_ID (8KCKDWED,"journalArticle","2018","Menon, R. K.), the other authors as well as the title are split over multiple cells.

If I use the data-split option in excel to split the information in multiple rows it would still take a lot of time to organize the bibliographic information correctly.

Is there any way to get the bibliographic information look like in the video?

I use the latest version of zotero (5.0.62).

Kind regards

adamsmith

The exported files is proper CSV, i.e. comma separated fields. It's quite unlikely to be broken (let alone corrupted). How exactly are you opening it in Excel?

emilianoeheyns

If it's all in one cell, the most likely scenario is excel's infuriating decision to make the separator for comma separated values import locale dependent and not prompt the user about this (as libreoffice does) - it may be expecting semicolons for separators. There's a way to force excel to accept commas as separators between values, but I don't readily know the procedure.

adamsmith

Importing via Data --> From Text allows you to fine-tune import, including selecting the delimiter.

sfglio

THANK YOU for your fast reply!

Indeed, sometimes excel recognizes the csv and asks for the correct separation and sometimes it doesn't.

However via the hint from adamsmith it works!!