Upgrade StorageImporting plain text bibliographies
My organisation, whose website I run, provides bibliographies for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) to members as Word docs. The references in these docs are of the form:
Alexander J. and Dickson M. (2006) Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing (New Dimensions in Computers and Composition), Cresskill, Broadway: Hampton Press.
We would like to put these references into Zotero, then maintain the bibliographies using Zotero groups. However, there are hundreds of the references and manual copy and paste is out of the question as we're all working pro bono and are short of time.
So, is there a way to parse the Word (or RTF or PDF) docs to extract these references to a machine-readable form which can then be imported into Zotero?
I have read the fine manual, and searched this forum. There's a thread "Importing without metadata, or converting bibliography" which points you to another thread "Create entry from selection" which in turn points you to four other threads which I could only skimread but didn't appear to have any solution.
One suggestion was to use cb2bib which I downloaded and installed, but I just can't make head or tail of it or figure out how it works.
Can anyone make any suggestions as to how we can go about converting our text bibliographies? Or is there just no simple, or not too complex, way of doing this? I could write a text parser in PHP if I had time, perhaps, but I don't, sadly. It's taken me an hour just to get to the point of writing this request.
I'm not a librarian, researcher, student or indeed at all familiar with citations and references, so please don't assume any prior knowledge. I'm just a humble web administrator.
Fred
www.fredriley.org.uk
Alexander J. and Dickson M. (2006) Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing (New Dimensions in Computers and Composition), Cresskill, Broadway: Hampton Press.
We would like to put these references into Zotero, then maintain the bibliographies using Zotero groups. However, there are hundreds of the references and manual copy and paste is out of the question as we're all working pro bono and are short of time.
So, is there a way to parse the Word (or RTF or PDF) docs to extract these references to a machine-readable form which can then be imported into Zotero?
I have read the fine manual, and searched this forum. There's a thread "Importing without metadata, or converting bibliography" which points you to another thread "Create entry from selection" which in turn points you to four other threads which I could only skimread but didn't appear to have any solution.
One suggestion was to use cb2bib which I downloaded and installed, but I just can't make head or tail of it or figure out how it works.
Can anyone make any suggestions as to how we can go about converting our text bibliographies? Or is there just no simple, or not too complex, way of doing this? I could write a text parser in PHP if I had time, perhaps, but I don't, sadly. It's taken me an hour just to get to the point of writing this request.
I'm not a librarian, researcher, student or indeed at all familiar with citations and references, so please don't assume any prior knowledge. I'm just a humble web administrator.
Fred
www.fredriley.org.uk
This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.
http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_formatted_bibliographies
Unfortunately, parsing formatted bibliographies is just not something that works particularly well, so I'd not be hopeful that you'll be able to automate the entire process without a significant amount of human input/corrections. If you have a little bit of resources, you could consider using Amazon Mechanical Turk.
I've never been able to get satisfactory results (or much in terms of results at all) with cb2bib, so maybe try some of the other tools. FreeCite is very simple to use, but it only actually generates data for articles it seems, even where it recognizes books.
I get your point about parsing, as from my rudimentary knowledge of referencing there are more referencing standards than a porcupine has quills.
Cheers
Fred