BibTeX support in Zotero

madhusudansingh
Zotero is my favourite study tool. I have lost count of the number of ways in which it has made my life easier. I would like to contribute in any way I can (within my capabilities).

However, on one aspect, it visibly lags behind Mendeley. That is the nature and quality of the BibTeX support. I currently use autozotbib (http://www.rtwilson.com/academic/autozotbib) to generate a bib file for my references, but its somewhat kludgy, and importantly, there is no field within the Zotero information pane (on the right) which quickly shows what the bibtex citation key is for a given document. Initially, when I migrated from Mendeley, I did not think it a big deal, but right now, I am writing a review paper that requires insertion of a lot of references. The business of opening a text file in terminal and searching for the right entry and then using the key through copy/paste is just too time and energy consuming.

Further, for my large library, autozotbib is quite slow when adding / modifying any entries.

Are there any plans to more tightly integrate BibTeX? Given that a lot of the Zotero userbase uses LaTeX, this has to be a somewhat popular query.
  • bwiernik
    edited June 2, 2014
    Check out https://github.com/AllThatIsTheCase/zotero-better-bibtex. It has a much smoother and more native interface for BibTex support, and it doesn't have the speed problems that can plague autozotbib on large libraries.
  • madhusudansingh
    Thanks, bwiernik. I just ran into that link myself. I have installed it. I do not want to come across as very stupid (though I probably am), but where is the bibtex (.bib) file dumped? The configuration pane (at least mine) does not have any place for where the .bib file goes.
  • bwiernik
    I will admit that I don't use LaTeX, so I have never set this plugin up myself, only seen it working. From what I understand, the intention is that you don't maintain a separate .bib file continuously, but generate it each time as part of your TeX compiling.

    https://github.com/AllThatIsTheCase/zotero-better-bibtex/wiki/Pull-Export
  • madhusudansingh
    Unusual.

    Its a pity that this thing does not have better documentation.

    I am concerned that this will not really work for journal submissions where you are often asked to supply a .bib file in addition to the .tex source.
  • bwiernik
    Follow the documentation there. It should generate the .bib file.
  • madhusudansingh
    Well, that is the entire problem, isn't it? There is no documentation. From configuration pane, it goes directly to problems. No mention of how exactly the process works. Heck, even a flowchart would be useful.
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited June 5, 2014
    There is no separate process; for all its bells and whistles, it's really not much more than a (better) import/export translator. The exporter works as usual; you could use autozotbib incombination with the plugin if you wanted to. What I use myself is an arara rule (https://github.com/ZotPlus/zotero-better-bibtex/blob/master/zoterobib.yaml) that uses the pull export to download the bib file as part of my build process. That would also make sure that your bib file is always up to date.

    I've moved the documentation to the github wiki included with the repo; I'll gladly fix any documentation deficiencies, but as the author, I'm a bit blind to those deficiencies, so they often need to be pointed out to me.
  • emilianoeheyns
    I've tried to clarify where better-bibtex plugin fits into the Zotero picture in the documentation at https://github.com/ZotPlus/zotero-better-bibtex/.

    I try to stop by here every now and then, but would encourage anyone who has questions or complaints about better-bibtex to file an issue on github. I know for most people it's *another* account to create, but there's the benefit that I'll probably pick up the issue immediately.
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