*push*

did nobody else encounter this problem yet?

I wanted to start using zotero today and also found this is a problem. And as there are no solutions posted to your question, I guess Zotero cant fix it yet. My cumbersome work-around will probably be to use the lacking entry until the final publication of my dissertation and then manually add missing info.

I think he wants itemFields.accessDate shown as Accessed in the right hand window.

Unfortunately BibTeX doesn´t have a field to put this in unless you use an extension such as found at ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/contrib/urlbst/urlbst.html which provides for a lastchecked field.

It would also be nice if Zotero correctly downloaded the web-page's publication date (This is correctly displayed in the Firefox Page Info pop-up as Modified:, but is not placed in the Date field of zotero)

problem solved,

used scaffold to load the bibTeX translator (id: 9cb70025-a888-4a29-a210-93ec52da40d4) from the repository and made 2 changes

on line 81 add:


var monthsU = ["January", "February", "March", "April", "May", "June",
"July", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December"]


change line 1953


var date = Zotero.Utilities.strToDate(item.accessDate );
writeField("howpublished", item.url + " [Last accessed on " + monthsU[date.month] + " " + date.day + ", " + date.year + " ]" );


and save to database

now the bibTeX file it should look like this:


@misc{_zotero_????,
title = {Zotero Forums - Export BibTeX - webpage specific fields/information missing..},
url = {http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1302/export-bibtex-webpage-specific-fieldsinformation-missing/\#Item\_7},
howpublished = {http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1302/export-bibtex-webpage-specific-fieldsinformation-missing/\#Item\_7 [Last accessed in December 3, 2008 ]}
},


edit: scafold didn't detect any translators on zotero-1.5.a(from today) so i had to use the stable version 1.0.7

Gents, please add extra fields in GUI so this will be closely integrated with Bibtex and finally become a useful piece of software !

Why is it so difficult to add support for extra fields like for each elements (including links and files): author, year.
In can be done on a separate tab after "Related".

Thank you !

Whoops. I see that the "editor" field is working fine.

Apologies in advance for the length of this post. The short version: we need a second BibTeX export in Zotero that cares less for hitting BibTeX standards (whatever those are) than getting maximum metadata exported in a BibTeX-y mungeable, way.

There are really two reasons a person might want BibTeX export from Zotero, and I think that they would be best served by two different BibTeX exporters.

(1) The first person wants to keep Zotero as the 'main database' and exports to a BibTeX file only as a data conduit to BibTeX/LaTeX, which for the moment still prefers to get its data in a '.bib' file. This person wants a single place for their data, doesn't want to fiddle with it between export and use, and wants to use Zotero is the One Reliable Frontend to it, basically a BibTeX database manager.

(2) The other person wants to make a good one-time export of everything they've got in Zotero to a BibTeX database for a specific project. Their BibTeX requirements just aren't met (and maybe can't be met) by Zotero's BibTeX export, for reasons mentioned above. This person was happy to use Zotero for the collection process, but they know they need to give their database BibTeX specific nuances that the Zotero-exported database doesn't have.

So far, we're mainly trying to make (1) work, but (2) is easier and arguably as important. Zotero and BibTeX just currently have some incompatibilities, many of which are faults in BibTeX that Zotero can't be made to compensate for without big, possibly ugly, changes.

Option (1) makes the most sense from a usability point of view, and is--it seems from various forum discussions--what many LaTeX users who approach Zotero hope it can do for them. However a lot of things have to be perfect for this to work. It's only possible if Zotero exports all the data you need to cite with, does so in the BibTeX fields you require, and it all happens in an encoding that BibTeX is happy with and with the capitalization conventions that your BibTeX implimentation can "do the right thing" with. Also, the data models have to line up for the kinds of items you use --in particular w.r.t. things in collections and (in the humanities) original publication data. Finally, if the resulting .bib file is to be usable straight from Zotero, it can't contain things that, though they may be legal BibTeX, will be incorporated into their bibliography in ways that the users don't want them. (Biblatex, the most mature and ambitious attempt at "BibTeX 2.0", uses the URL and DOI fields if it finds them, which I mostly don't want if it's a print publication). A lot of conditions have to be met for this method to work.

There may be some people that are doing this now with Zotero and Latex, but I'd be pretty surprised if there were many. They have to be citing things with simple requirements, not classical texts, things in complex collections, or with "original edition" data. They must not need any non-standard fields, and must be happy with the subset of data that Zotero exports. I just adopted biblatex and the biblatex-chicago-notes-df extension of it, and I see that a lot of things would have to align for a person to be able to use Zotero-exported BibTeX directly with those tools.

The main problem is that for this to work, Zotero would need a fair amount of BibTeX-specific functionality, and be able to work efficiently with various semi-standard BibTeX fields as new successors of traditional bibtex develop. "Standard" BibTeX is broken for many many use cases. Every one knows it, and if your citation needs are complex, then you will quite likely be making use of some extension to it. For Zotero to work with in these cases, it has to be both BibTeX-aware and adaptable, and its export certainly has to be configurable and even extensible/programmable. Citation with BibTeX just has too many requirements for it to really work otherwise.

I know that there are several things that mitigate against Zotero being so BibTeX aware: development priorities and resources, usability for non-LaTeX users, and a very reasonable desire to improve on the way things were done by doing them differently. Whether Zotero really can be useful and efficient for LaTeXers is an open question, but I don't think it's possible without a good deal of specific functionality, which also has to be adaptable to particular implementations of BibTeX.

Since (1) is so hard to get right, and since Zotero is such a good capture too, you are likely to find a number of people who want to do (2). They expect--or need to expect-- that they may have to massage their Zotero-exported BibTeX to set up capitalization, encoding, field names, hierarchical relationships, original publication data, and typographical niceties like non-breaking spaces and titles within titles in a way that their BibTeX is happy with. They need to delete those pesky URLs, DOIs and the extra bibliographic data which Zotero so easily slurped in. They may still use Zotero to gather new database items, but they will export them and process them before adding them to their purpose-build .bib file. Incidentally, this category includes those both those who expect to continue using Zotero for collection, and those who just plain want to migrate completely to a bibtex-y solution.

I need to do (2). This means (a) I want a pretty complete export of the data I have in Zotero, and (b) I don't care as much if some of the fields are in if the odd fields are in non-standard BibTeX. BibTeX will ignore the stuff it doesn't know about, I'll hack the file into submission anyway, and in fact I'll be converting URLs to some non-standard field name on purpose, or removing them. Ideally the mapping would be customizable, and capitalization easy to specify, etc, but the main thing is (as some have called for on other threads) is that everything is there. (And what is "standard" BibTeX anyway, for goodness sake. To make it usable in the 21stC, you have to stretch it a bit!)

Do you mean it's a good change and you are willing and able to make it, or that you can pass it on to someone who is?

I mean it would be a good change, should be straight-forward, and I may get around to writing a patch myself, but you shouldn't wait for me.

Or only that you'd be willing to accept a patch on it, if I can manage the change myself.

I am not able to accept your patch, but can't think of anything that would prevent accepting a patch this straight forward.

whether you're a helpful user or connected to the development team in an official capacity.

I'm not on the development team; I'm a user that has contributed a few minor patches that have made it into the code, though.

"However, this useful and important information is missing when I export data in BiBTeX format. "

Hello, are there any new informations/features avaliable?

How can I export the date of last access of a webpage into an bibtex-entry? This information is lost at the moment using Zotero 2.1.8