BibTeX crossref import not implemented yet?

pdmosses
BibTeX allows use of the crossref field, which is exploited by at least one major database: DBLP, and especially useful for avoiding duplication of information regarding multiple articles in conference proceedings and journal issues.

I tried importing a BibTeX entry that uses crossref. Zotero imported it, but unfortunately did not copy the missing fields from the crossref'ed entry to the corssref'ing entry. (The booktitle and year fields should really appear only in the proceedings entry; their duplication is an idiosyncrasy of DBLP, but still legal in BibTeX.) That makes Zotero BibTeX import unusable for me, since exporting such imports back to BibTeX format produces entries with missing fields.

I think that this is a significant bug. I searched for previous reports of it (bibtex crossref) in Support but didn't find any, so presumably it isn't an issue for the current Zotero users, and it's therefore unlikely to be fixed in 2.0. However, it should be rather easy for Zotero to preprocess BibTeX data, simply replacing all crossref fields by the non-overridden fields from the cited entry (which must occur later). So perhaps there's hope for it in some later version?

Of course, it would be even better if Zotero retained the crossref relationship between the entries, and recreated the original entries on export, but that isn't so crucial for me.
  • reitmayr
    I fully support this suggestion. I am trying zotero to be able to share references with colleagues. I just tried to import an 800 entry bibtex library with extensive use of crossref and many entries are now missing information. Manually correcting all the faulty entries is really not feasible.

    It would be great if Zotero could support this feature at least on import from bibtex.
  • ajlyon
    This sounds like a nice potential improvement to the BibTex translator-- the code is at https://www.zotero.org/trac/browser/extension/trunk/translators/BibTeX.js , and such a patch would, as you say, probably be not overly complicated. If you have some programming skill (not much-- Zotero translators are pretty simple), then perhaps you could try?
  • sebastian.lehrig
    I also need this functionality. Has anything happend in this area since 2010?
  • adamsmith
    no, what ajlyon writes still holds.
  • noksagt
    There are various third party programs that can flatten crossref (such as bibcat) or can convert to another file format (I think bibutils does this) if this is something you only need to do a few times.
  • sebastian.lehrig
    edited December 18, 2012
    That's a pity that this feature is still not implemented. I hope, it will follow soon.

    @noksagt: I'm trying to manage the literature of a project that will run for 3 years from now. Flattening or moving to other formats is an option I would like to prevent :(
  • noksagt
    Zotero doesn't use BibTeX as a backend, but imports it into its own database. So, I'm not sure I see the downside of a little bit of cleanup before that happens....
  • sebastian.lehrig
    edited December 18, 2012
    Well, the crossref feature itself might also be added to Zotero without needing to stick directly to BibTeX, i.e., in Zotero's backend. This will then enable an improved BibTeX import/export.

    Generally, I really like using Zotero and I will use some workaround for the crossref feature meanwhile. Nonetheless, I hope this feature request finds some attention by the Zotero developers.
  • adamsmith
    there are plans to add something along the lines of crossref to Zotero (search for "hierarchical item types" if you're interested), but they requires substantial changes to the database model and are a long way out.
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