Moving in-text citations from My Library to a group library

Matthew.Forbes

I have a folder of references in My Library, that I have been using to write a chapter of a report. We are now going to have a bibliography that is compiled from the group library. (We are writing in Word, and I am using the Zotero plugin to insert in-text citations which are stored in the Word doc as fields)

I can easily copy my references in Zotero into the Group library, but my in-text citations remain 'pointed' towards the folder in My Library.

My question is: is there a way that I can redirect my in-text citations towards the group library?

(Or do I have to go through and re-do them one by one?).

Thanks!

dstillman

It depends exactly what your goal is.

Metadata for those items is embedded in the document, and you or other people who use Zotero with the document will be able to refresh the document and generate a bibliography. You and others can also insert additional instances of those citations by selecting from the Cited section of the citation bar.

However, if you don't reinsert them from the group library, no one other than you will be able to make further changes to the metadata for those items, and if you or someone else inserts a citation for one of those items from the group library instead of your personal library, Zotero will consider those duplicate items and try to disambiguate them in the document per the style rules. So reinserting is the safest way to avoid problems. But if everyone is careful, it's not necessary.

(I could imagine a future feature where a document could be manually relinked with a different library, but it would be quite complicated. It would have to offer to copy any items you hadn't yet copied, potentially overwriting existing metadata, etc.)

Matthew.Forbes

Thanks for that. We are seeking to have shared library and ultimately one bibliography. We want one team member to be able to edit the metadata to make sure that it is all consistent to run things from a shared library so that we don't have duplicated items.

Looks like I will have to copy the references across, and then reinsert citations ...