Using Zotero with a large (previously) fully referenced document

Eofios

Hi, I've been using Zotero for two days now and I am blown away by its features and ease of use, I genuinely think is is one of the best pieces of research equipment ever developed. Still sorting out some small issues though. One is that I have a large fully referenced document now as I near the end of my PhD and I'd like to use Zotero to format a bibliography. What's the best way to do this. In endnote there is a feature that picks up citations automatically and asks of you want to add the bibliographic reference. Any thoughts on the best way to do this?

noksagt

What do you mean by "fully referenced?" What format are the citations in & is there already a bibliography or not?

Zotero has relatively limited means of converting legacy documents right now & you'll have to do much of it by hand.

Eofios

Ok, thanks. There's no bibliography at the moment but considerable in-text citations which are not linked to Zotero. Sounds like I should drop the bibliographic references directly from the library to word instead of linking Zotero to the citations.

noksagt

Depending on how those citations are formatted, the rtf scan feature in the beta version of zotero may be worth a try.

Sounds like I should drop the bibliographic references directly from the library to word instead of linking Zotero to the citations.

I don't really know what you mean by this...

Eofios

Sorry I meant that I will have to manually create the bibliography. Will try the rtf scan feature.

adamsmith

yes, I think just selecting the relevant citations in Zotero and use "Create Bibliography" (or do drag and drop to the same effect - I think that's what he means noksagt - ) will most likely be your best guess.
rtf scan picks up citations formatted as [author, year] - if you can change that easily in your document that would facilitate things.

SimonCropper

Eofios,

The problem with creating a bibliography externally and then placing it in your word document is that you don't have the comfort that all references that are cited are in the bibliography, and what is in the bibliography is actually what has been cited or cited at all.

My suggestion is...
1. Create a collection of references or just a library of all the references that you have in your PhD. Check they contain all relevant data and the style is correct.
2. Open word and make it that all 'fields' are permanently shaded.
3. Work through your document with Zotero Open and replace all the references with the Zotero Cotations. You will be able to distinguish between citations that have been converted and those that have not, because once you replace the citation it will be shaded.

I have converted quite large documents in this way and have only taken a day to do it. Consider the alternative however -- reading the entire document and cross-checking citations with references in the bibliography, and visa versa. For a large document this takes quite some time.

Simon

mark

The RTF scan is worth trying. Doing that, or doing it like Simon, gives you the ability to shuffle references, add in new ones, etc. with the confidence that Zotero is keeping your bibliography up to date. That is much better than plugging in an essentially unlinked bibliography.

Eofios

Thanks Mark, will have a look at the RTF scan function