Working between Mendeley and Zotero in one document?

t.hrynick

I am co-authoring a piece with another person who has now shared his piece of the work with me which I will now proceed to add my own material to, as well as edit his. He has been using Mendeley to insert his citations and generate a bibliography for the paper whereas I use Zotero.

Because I do not have Mendeley, when I open the document he has sent, the citations and references appear as simple text with no metadata linked or anything. Is it possible to get Zotero to somehow 'read' this data so that we can ensure all our citations are linked to one another as well as to one bibliography?

Not really sure where to start. Will I need to download Mendeley? Or get him to export his library and send it to me so that I can import it into Zotero (but will I then need to go through the document and re-enter all his citations via Zotero)? Any guidance appreciated.

adomasven

Zotero does not directly support collaborative writing with Mendeley, but at least in the past document cited with Mendeley Desktop in Word and saved as .doc(x) were compatible with Zotero and vice-versa in that you could edit citations and generate bibliography with either program. Switching between programs does unlink item references from their respective libraries and if you amend details for cited items in Zotero or Mendeley libraries those changes wouldn't be reflected in the document.

I am not sure whether citations made with Mendeley Cite (a relatively new Mendeley product) are compatible with Zotero.

Either way I would recommend to stick to a single program for citing. If you manage to get compatible citing between the two, but eventually end up having citation corruption or some deep compatibility issues arise, neither Elsevier, nor Zotero will be able to help you troubleshoot your problems.

bwiernik

In general, if you are citing anything other than journal articles, books, or book chapters (e.g., reports, conference papers, presentations, etc.), Zotero will generally give you more accurate citations. I would recommend you taking responsibility for inserting formatted citations using Zotero moving forward.