citation key and BibTeX import

edsu

Is there a way to preserve the citation key when importing using BibTex? This is pretty important for me so I don't have to rewrite reams of citations that I'm processing with pandoc-citeproc.

bwiernik

If you have the BetterBibTeX plugin installed, it will pin the citation keys on import. If “Citation Key” appears in Extra, it’s pinned and preserved.

edsu

Oh, thanks! I didn't have it as a separate Citation-Key field. It looked like this:

@book{Latour:1993,
Author = "Latour, Bruno",
Date-Added = "2019-07-23 18:06:52 -0400",
Date-Modified = "2019-07-23 18:07:39 -0400",
Keywords = "Philosophy ; STS ; ANT",
Publisher = "Harvard University Press",
Title = "We have never been modern.",
Year = "1993"
}

So I would need it to look like this?

@book{Latour:1993,
Author = "Latour, Bruno",
Date-Added = "2019-07-23 18:06:52 -0400",
Date-Modified = "2019-07-23 18:07:39 -0400",
Keywords = "Philosophy ; STS ; ANT",
Publisher = "Harvard University Press",
Title = "We have never been modern.",
Year = "1993",
Citation-Key = "Latour:1993"
}

bwiernik

No, the “@“ part is the citation key. If it imported, you should see it in the Extra field in Zotero.

emilianoeheyns

It's actually easiest to just install Better BibTeX and import the first sample as-is I think. You'll see how it ends up in the UI, I think that will make things clearer. So you can just import

@book{Latour:1993,
Author = "Latour, Bruno",
Date-Added = "2019-07-23 18:06:52 -0400",
Date-Modified = "2019-07-23 18:07:39 -0400",
Keywords = "Philosophy ; STS ; ANT",
Publisher = "Harvard University Press",
Title = "We have never been modern.",
Year = "1993"
}

after installation of BBT. No need to change anything about the bibtex you import.

emilianoeheyns

(date-added and date-modified will be retained by BBT on import in the extra field -- translators cannot modify the zotero equivalents)