Importing RIS from Reference Manager - Special Characters

Hi, Everybody:
I'm new to Zotero and loving it. I've been using Reference Manager for a long time and had some trouble with special characters while importing to Zotero.

Since I could eventually figure out how to solve it, with the help of this forum and advice from another site, I thought maybe my solution could help other people in the same situation. If I'm being repetitive, or this post is otherwise useless, please forgive me and delete it.

So, my problem was Reference Manager did not export the RIS file in UTF-8, therefore special characters were not imported correctly.

All I had to do (after many searches and failed attempts) was:
1. Export the RIS file in Reference Manager;
2. Open it in Word;
a. In the dialog box, select MS-DOS (don't know why); if it doesn't work, you may try other combinations until the sample text in the box below is readable.
3. Save the file as TXT.
4. Import it in Zotero.

That's it.
Regards,
Renato.
  • edited May 31, 2013
    I struggle with the same issue of special characters export from refman. I couldn't work around it using rtsaboya's suggestion because ris export is already not including special characters. What worked easily for special characters is:
    export from Refman using XML
    import XML in mendeley desktop
    export from mendeley in bib tex
    and import in zotero.

    Remaining issue: A number of fields are put together in one note like -DA, -LS, -LA, Maybe I'll have to edit those manually in notepad ?
  • It should say in the note that Zotero doesn't have a mapping for those fields
    See here for some details:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_records_from_endnote#importing_into_zotero
  • edited June 1, 2013
    Edit
    The export from RM has always performed poorly --even to EndNote. Fot items that are online it may be quicker to re-import them into Zotero.

    Earlier versions of RefMan didn't use unicode for decorated characters but it had its own limited system. I don't know about the most recent version. RM also did a poor job of importing metada that was UTF-8 encoded. I used Reference Manager from the days of CP/M until 2008 when I left it for Zotero. I briefly used EndNote Win but quickly gave that up.
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