How to create website with zotero-friendly metadata

cricketbird
I've recently taken over the website for my organization. We publish annual conference proceedings and would like to modernize our website to be more like a scientific journal - complete with "scrapeable" data and friendliness for things like Zotero. I'm the most tech-savvy among us, but I am mostly familiar with wordpress/css sorts of things (clearly we are a small, low-budget sort of org). This level of web development is new to me.

I'm eager to learn, but don't really know where to start. Is the necessary metadata on the page or the PDF file or both? What data alerts Zotero plugins that there is a citation on the page and causes the paper/book icon to appear in the address bar? What keywords/concepts/tutorials could I start searching for to point me in the right direction? Are there, by any chance, any WordPress-based themes or plugins that generate these sorts of data?

Thanks!
CB
  • adamsmith
    Start here:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/exposing_metadata
    There are WordPress plugins that include COinS or unAPI:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/plugins#wordpress

    COinS is more widely supported, unAPI the technically superior solution (since it can serve up richter data). I'm not aware of a WordPress solution that generates rich embedded metadata (though I believe default WordPress includes basic Dublin Core), though other content management systems like epress do.
  • cricketbird
    Thank you, adamsmith! Those are exactly the sort of resources I was looking for.
  • Dharma Halim
    Thank you. So, my website http://adl.aptik.or.id should generate Dublin core metadata to ensure the bibliography can be exported to Zotero. Is the website's URL also need to be registered to 'Zotero admin'? Where can I contact him/her?
  • adamsmith
    as long as you use standard data formats, Zotero will just pick them up regardless of the URL. No need to register your site with anyone.
  • Dharma Halim
    How to know if my website has used standard data formats or not? My website use a relational database software that put information of title, author, publisher, etc in fields or columns of many tables that reference each other. Should I re-arrange them into a long text that begin with <xml:title....><author....>... to convert them to Dublin Core?
  • adamsmith
    sorry, not sure I understand the question. Zotero reads DC, prism, epress, bepress, and google highwire metatags from the site header. If any of those are implemented Zotero will recognize them—and obviously you'd know if you had those in the site header.
  • Dharma Halim
    Is Dublin Core and RIS format for EndNote could be recognized by Zotero?

    Does our website have to use Open Archive Initiative (OAI)-Protocol Metadata Harvesting (PMH) service?
  • adamsmith
    Is Dublin Core and RIS format for EndNote could be recognized by Zotero?
    Note that the data has to be in the page header. You can't just put it anywhere on the page, so while Zotero can import RIS, since it can't be placed in a standard format into the page header it won't automatically recognize it (unless served via unAPI).
    Dublin Core (DC) in the site header is recognized. You don't need to use OAI-PMH, no.
  • ChristianR
    https://www.zotero.org/support/plugins#wordpress

    I wonder if such plugins are still useful and working in the newest 4.x Wordpress versions.

    COinS Metadata Exposer from Zotero (2007) is not maintained on the WP Plugins page (Version 0.5, declared compatible up to WP 2.1).

    ScholarPress Coins 1.3 from 2012 declared compatible up to WP 3.3.2.

    COinS WordPress Plugin is from 2005 and looking at the comments not working anymore since at least WP 3.8.

    I just do not want to install plugins that are more causing problems then helping.
  • adamsmith
    I don't know of many people using these, but maybe start with what your goal is? There are a fair number of tools that will embed metadata for the post itself in WordPress posts -- that's what most of the above add-ons do via COinS, but for a blogpost, something like DC will work just fine. I think default WordPress even does this fairly well.

    On the other hand, for having Zotero pick up reference you cite in an article, you can simply export bibliographies using Zotero as html and it will include COinS for the references.
  • ChristianR
    My goals: using my Zotero database in Wordpress (I plan to try Zotpress for this) and at the same time import Wordpress posts as clean as possible in Zotero.
    I hope I will have time to test trough all of this.
  • adamsmith
    for just importing blogPost, I'd start by just looking at what a default WP install gives you. I think the embedded metadata is actually quite good. If that's not good enough, look at a Dublin Core plugin or something like that to improve the header. I wouldn't bother with COinS for that purpose.
  • ChristianR
    Ok. Thanks. Will try with a fresh WP site.
  • everb
    edited June 30, 2017
    Hi @adamsmith, I have the reverse question: we use OJS to publish our journal, the metadata of which we then import into a WordPress front-end that I would like to make exposable to Zotero and other reference managers. We have custom metadata fields to include author's names, abstracts, DOIs and the like. What would be your recommendation here to go about exposing those?
  • zurpher
    Colleagues and I are looking into setting up a scholarly journal on WordPress and are looking for best practice to provide bibliographic metadata for the articles for Zotero users but also beyond. Who can point me to WordPress-based journals that have successfully tackled such issues already?

    @everb Which journal are you working for?

    @ChristanR Did you have any success? Can you report back?

  • bwiernik
    If you don’t mind manually entering the metadata information on each article page, I wrote a simple WordPress plugin for exposing Google Scholar/Highwire Tags that Google and Zotero both recognize. I will clean it up and put onto GitHub in the next few days.
  • zurpher
    @bwiernik I would certainly give it a try. Have you used it successfully? An automated solution would obviously be more convenient.
  • bwiernik
    Here it is implemented. http://wiernik.workpsy.ch/downloads/age-and-employee-green-behaviors-a-meta-analysis/

    It’s code could probably be adjusted to pull metadata from a database rather than manually entered, but that is beyond my coding ability.
  • everb
    edited July 4, 2017
    @zurpher We publish VIEW Journal and the Journal for Media History (TMG):
    - http://www.viewjournal.eu
    - http://www.tmgonline.nl
    @bwiernik Looks promising, thanks for sharing!
  • bwiernik
    Here are the php functions I use in combination with the WordPress MetaBox plugin to add scholarly metadata to my WordPress site:
    https://github.com/bwiernik/WP-Citation-Metadata/
  • joycekwc
    Just in case anyone else comes to this thread - all the Wordpress plugins mentioned in the documentation do seem to be out of date for exposing metadata. I have just tried the Dublin Core Metadata Generator plugin and it works fine for blog posts (slightly better than the default which isn't too bad).
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