Controlling sort order of items in export as Scannable Cite

djross3

I would like to control the sort order when I export in Scannable Cite format. Either by using Quick Copy or by exporting, I end up with all of the selected items in a random format (maybe falling back to Date Added to Zotero?).

I would like to be able to generate a Scannable Cite list of items ordered either by Year or alphabetically by Author.

Is that possible? I know that I could use another program to sort the generated list alphabetically by author, but:
1) Scannable Cite format uses the first creator listed, thus not always the one it will be cited by (e.g. editor of a book, rather than author of a chapter).
2) It would be much harder to use another program to sort by Year.


(This is an independent question, but if you're wondering my intended usage is explained here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/81890/automatically-enter-multiple-citations-e-g-whole-collection-in-word)

adamsmith

I'm afraid not, no. Export translators (since they're designed for metadata), don't allow for sorting.
It _would_ likely be possible to go to more length to get the "right" creator first in ScannableCite -- the code isn't terribly complicated, so you might try hacking it yourself. Note also that, if you don't plan to rely on the authors, you could just remove them in the export. The scan doesn't care about that part of the scan marker at all.

djross3

OK, I understand, thanks for clarifying. (If you do have a better suggestion for a routine that will automatically copy a collection into separate cites in Word-- see the linked question above-- please let me know. I realize this isn't the intention of this sort of metadata export, but it does work for my purposes.)

Out of curiosity, would it be in principle possible to create a CSL style equivalent to this export format? Or are there technical limitations having to do with, e.g., disambiguation that would make that difficult?

For the moment this is a sort of awkward, but working, solution for me, so no need to put more effort into it.

bwiernik

Such a thing might be possible once Zotero has a dedicated citekey field

adamsmith

No, ScannableCite can't be generated by CSL because CSL can't access the item IDs on which it relies (otherwise we'd have done this via CSL which would make lots of things easier). My hope is that in future Zotero versions, which could very well be 5.1/6.0, we get a Zotero citekey that's unique and accessible via CSL. (At that point, Zotero could also easily make RTF Scan reliable enough to allow us to just retire ODF-Scan).

As for your larger question: you do need these as active citations? Just using citations or bibliographies created from Zotero collections or tags won't do?
And this does have to generate live Zotero fields? E.g. working with pandoc for scanning docs isn't an option?

djross3

That makes sense about the IDs. Glad it's on the list to add in a future version.

As for your larger question: you do need these as active citations? Just using citations or bibliographies created from Zotero collections or tags won't do?
And this does have to generate live Zotero fields? E.g. working with pandoc for scanning docs isn't an option?

This may be an unusual case, but I literally want a list (separated by commas) of the cites in a paragraph, within a longer paper (thesis) in Word. I'm creating a sort of encyclopedic list of references about a certain topic, say, 100 of them. Given that many, it's worth automating it (currently about 8 steps of converting as described in the other thread take me about 3 minutes), instead of searching for and inserting every entry within the document. Of course it wouldn't be worth the extra effort if it wasn't so many, say, under 10.

Basically I want the format of "here are some references: (...), (...), (...), ..."*
[*My Word macro will convert those to the appropriate embedded 'Author (YYYY)' format.]

Yes, it needs to be active fields because it's part of the longer document and these should be added to the bibliography. I suppose I could manually add them to the bibliography, as well as creating corresponding plain-text cites, but that would prevent any future changes in my library from being updated in the text, and it would be much harder to sync future edits if I want to add or remove an item.

Anyway, this is functional now. I just wanted to confirm there wasn't an easier way.