Can we generate an export-text-file by journal and by year?

sdspieg

I have a library with about 5500 items. It was downloaded from Scopus and WoS, then imported (with deduplication on - which seems to have worked pretty well) into Endnote, then exported to xml, and now being re-imported into Zotero. We have now received a request to generate a bibliography (including the abstracts, which do seem to have navigated all of those conversions quite elegantly) not sorted, as usually, in alphabetical order, but primarily by journal, and then secondarily by year. Is that possible? And if so, how can it be generated? Thanks!

adamsmith

You'd have to modify the citation style, but it's pretty simple.
You'd replace the current sort section in the library by
<sort>
<key variable="container-title"/>
<key variable="issued"/>
</sort>

Where ideally you'd replace the variable="issued" with macro="issued-year" or whatever your citation style of choice labels the macro that displays just the publication year.

General instructions here: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step

don't forget the style name and ID changes.

poettli

Are you talking about the built-in function "generate report"?

fbennett

No, he's talking about editing a CSL style file, for bibliography output. If the abstract has come through in the Abstract field, not a note, then you could produce this document as an annotated bibliography with a suitable CSL style.

adamsmith

Oh right -- I think the only style with abstract currently available from the style repository is
https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=id:apa-annotated-bibliography

The modified sort section for that one would be
<sort>
<key variable="container-title"/>
<key macro="issued-sort"/>
</sort>

But adding an abstract to an existing style also isn't super hard.