Export complete bibliography into Word document

Ms Raffleasia

I have been using Zotero for my PhD. I haven't been making the best use of it because I find it difficult to understand, so I've just manually copied titles into Zotero. Now I want to create a bibliography for the whole thesis. I've tried following the steps recommended but can't make it work. Either it creates another library within Zotero or nothing happens or I get a screen shot of a Zotero page. I just want to transfer the whole library minus any notes into Word. Please help!

dstillman

These are your options:

https://www.zotero.org/support/creating_bibliographies

For a dissertation, you really want to be using the Word plugin, though perhaps you're too far along for that.

In any case, it's not at all clear what you're trying, so you'd have to be more specific:

https://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_problems#provide_steps_to_reproduce

Ms Raffleasia

Thank you dstillman.

I followed the bottom link which helped, as by exporting the entire library in RIS format I did manage to export the whole bibliography, but not in the right format or correctly spaced out, but all cramped together, and the titles are duplicated many times. As I've entered the titles into zotero manually over the past three years I may have duplicated a title every now and then but not most of them, and ten-fifteen times? I tried to paste in a screen shot but couldn't.

Ms Raffleasia

There so many duplications that the bibliography is now 70 pages long!

dstillman

I still don't understand what you're trying to do. RIS is an export format and doesn't have anything to do with generating a bibliography, so I don't even know what you're looking at.

You can upload screenshots somewhere (e.g., Dropbox) and provide a link here.

Ms Raffleasia

I am trying to complete the writing up of my thesis, which is in Word. I have manually entered the books and articles into zotero as I've read them, and now I want to copy the entire list over into the thesis as a final bibliography - not use it for footnotes or anything.

I see that a lot of the entries in the version I've just created give the title before the author. I wanted to use the Chicago style: author-date-title

Here's the link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r8glpghb0lodasw/Untitled Bibliography.docx?dl=0

dstillman

It just looks like you have a huge number of duplicates in Zotero and are selecting them all and manually generating a bibliography for them. Zotero will include in the bibliography whatever you select — it's just doing what you tell it to do.

You can use duplicate detection to try to remove duplicates. One way or another, you need to select the actual items you want included in the bibliography.

Again, note that this really isn't how you use Zotero. In the future, you would want to use the Word plugin to insert citations and then generate a bibliography from those citations with the click of a button.

dstillman

I also still don't know why you mentioned RIS. If you exported to RIS and then imported back into Zotero, that certainly would've duplicate everything you exported, as many times as you tried. If that's what you did, you can sort by Date Added and delete the whole batch of duplicate imported items.

adamsmith

There are two main things going on:
1. You have a lot of files with no metadata and a lot of items with very poor metadata. Zotero tries its best to import metadata for PDFs you drag to it, but that doesn't always work and you'll have to manually fix that. There are no real shortcuts here. This will take time to clean up.
2. You have lots of duplicates, potentially caused by some misunderstandings about Zotero. You can check your "Duplicates" folder which is a the bottom of your Zotero, where you can also merge duplicates.

It's up to you, but I'd honestly consider doing your bibliography manually at this point: This will probably take you a couple of days, but I don't see how you'd get a bibliography that's reliable enough for a doctoral dissertation given how you've used Zotero.

Ms Raffleasia

Okay, thank you both for trying to help.

The RIS thing was because that's the format I was told to use to export the complete library.

I've obviously being doing things all wrong for ages, and maybe the best thing is to do it all manually, as you suggest, Adam :(

dstillman

The RIS thing was because that's the format I was told to use to export the complete library.

Told by whom? We didn't say to do that.

adamsmith

I think RIS may just be a typo and refer to RTF? (which would indeed be the right thing to do and looks like it's how the linked bibliography was generated)

Ms Raffleasia

Yes, probably. I'm so not any good at this sort of thing, as you've gathered by now..