Add many authors at once

northsun
When Zotero cannot find the pdf metadata (mostly for conferences and technical reports) entering the author's names can be a time-consuming and boring job, especially if the publication is the results of a collaborative project resulting in ten or more authors.

It would save quit some time if it would be possible to copy and paste a textblock with comma separated author fields into the first author field and Zotero would recognise the commas and created new author fields for the co-authors.

In a few cases this could to a problem, for example if the author is an institution like "University of somewhere, department of something" but this could be solved with a on/off button for the feature.
  • dstillman
    You can already do this. You just need to use a tab instead of a comma to separate the last and first names, since it's less ambiguous.

    (In absence of tabs, this should probably be made to parse at a comma if the creator field is in two-field mode. I've created a ticket for that.)
  • northsun
    Dan, thanks for your feedback. However, I did not work for me.

    I copied the comma separated list of authors from the title page of a report to a text editor. I then added tabs between the first and last names like you recommended. (So authors are still separated by commas, but first and last names are separated by tabs) After that I copied the text block to the author field in Zotero. No new authors were created, independently if copied to in the one- or the two-field mode.

    Another thing I tried is to replace the commas between authors with tabs (authors separated by tabs, first and last names only separated by spaces) and than copy to Zotero. It had the same result.

    Finally I tried to use tabs between authors and between first and last names. Also without success.

    Am I doing something wrong? Is it my configuration (Zotero as Firefox plugin, linux OS), or....
  • northsun
    I just discovered by accident that separating the authors by line breaks does the trick.
  • adamsmith
    Yes -- it's newline-separated authors and tab-separated lastName, firstName

    The newline separation is true for other fields, too: it works for pasting multiple tags as well as multiple identifiers.

    If you have similar author lists for multiple works, you may want to have a look at Zutilo, which can copy author lists in the right format:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/zutilo-utility-for-zotero/
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