Upgrade StorageWord integration; import/export
I am new to using this software, but it seems to have some significant bugs in it that are real dealbreakers for me. I'm hoping that it is just that I'm a novice to the software and that there may be some ways for me to work with the software as it is--or that there are new editions in the works that will make it more user friendly.
Obviously it is fantastic at gathering information and the features you've produced that integrate the platform into my web-browsing experience are really fantastic. But after I have this information, I want to be able to use it--in particular in my scholarly writing. I am in the process of writing my dissertation and have used EndNote for many years so I am pretty familiar with that software. I also don't think the dearth of options you have in the Cite-While-you-write category are a real problem. As long as there is a way to insert the citations and create a bibliography from them, I'm golden. I can format it myself and there's little else I use.
But the tools you have for this don't seem to work very well. I use Word 2003 and I've set up the .dot file in the word systems folder. The toolbar appears in the program. But the things it says it is doing aren't done. The MLA-in text citation buts the citation information outside of the parenthesis and the bibliography it creates is has extra paragraphs in it and isn't formatted at all as the MLA would like it to be. But the bigger problem for me is the Chicago Style. The "Notes W/ Bibliography" function won't let you have a bibliography and the note itself doesn't contain all the information that you need in the bibliography. (I'll also note that, as I understand Chicago School, you have all the information in the first note and only use the short form title and info AFTER it's already been included in an earlier note; the default for this program is the shortform). I could use Chicago style w/o bibliography, but that isn't what I need. Finally, on the CWYW front, though there is supposedly a function here to include multiple titles, when I use it, it actually only includes one of them.
I could get around this problem if I could use this software for just collecting the information but could export it and use it in EndNote. But anytime I try to export, the program crashes. I sort of expected this, on the other hand, because it took me the better part of three hours to import my Endnote library into Zotero (foolishly I did this before I had really examined the CWYW functions). I eventually had to break up my library into 8 or nine parts (I have about 500 citations in my EndNote library, some with extensive notes in the note field) and import them in pieces. I suppose I might be able to export the library without crashing the program if I could divide up the library, but I don't see any way to do that yet. Either way, this makes me even more anxious about depending on the software because it makes it very hard to back it up if you can't export the data--or at least that is what I would think.
I think you have a really excellent program here and, as a fellow GMU student, I am very excited to see something like this come out of the school. But I am also somewhat curious as to how things as basic as the word interface and the import/export features don't figure more prominently as trouble items. Maybe I am doing something very wrong or maybe I'm just trying to do more than others have. Anyway, I look forward to future updates.
Obviously it is fantastic at gathering information and the features you've produced that integrate the platform into my web-browsing experience are really fantastic. But after I have this information, I want to be able to use it--in particular in my scholarly writing. I am in the process of writing my dissertation and have used EndNote for many years so I am pretty familiar with that software. I also don't think the dearth of options you have in the Cite-While-you-write category are a real problem. As long as there is a way to insert the citations and create a bibliography from them, I'm golden. I can format it myself and there's little else I use.
But the tools you have for this don't seem to work very well. I use Word 2003 and I've set up the .dot file in the word systems folder. The toolbar appears in the program. But the things it says it is doing aren't done. The MLA-in text citation buts the citation information outside of the parenthesis and the bibliography it creates is has extra paragraphs in it and isn't formatted at all as the MLA would like it to be. But the bigger problem for me is the Chicago Style. The "Notes W/ Bibliography" function won't let you have a bibliography and the note itself doesn't contain all the information that you need in the bibliography. (I'll also note that, as I understand Chicago School, you have all the information in the first note and only use the short form title and info AFTER it's already been included in an earlier note; the default for this program is the shortform). I could use Chicago style w/o bibliography, but that isn't what I need. Finally, on the CWYW front, though there is supposedly a function here to include multiple titles, when I use it, it actually only includes one of them.
I could get around this problem if I could use this software for just collecting the information but could export it and use it in EndNote. But anytime I try to export, the program crashes. I sort of expected this, on the other hand, because it took me the better part of three hours to import my Endnote library into Zotero (foolishly I did this before I had really examined the CWYW functions). I eventually had to break up my library into 8 or nine parts (I have about 500 citations in my EndNote library, some with extensive notes in the note field) and import them in pieces. I suppose I might be able to export the library without crashing the program if I could divide up the library, but I don't see any way to do that yet. Either way, this makes me even more anxious about depending on the software because it makes it very hard to back it up if you can't export the data--or at least that is what I would think.
I think you have a really excellent program here and, as a fellow GMU student, I am very excited to see something like this come out of the school. But I am also somewhat curious as to how things as basic as the word interface and the import/export features don't figure more prominently as trouble items. Maybe I am doing something very wrong or maybe I'm just trying to do more than others have. Anyway, I look forward to future updates.
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For what it's worth I think they're still calling the MS Word extension an "alpha" version. It's more of a work-in-progress meant to flag comments such as the one you made. Perhaps they'll have a new version ready with Zotero's Beta 4, which we're all awaiting any time now. And perhaps that version will take care of one or more of your/our problems.
For the developers, on a more technical note: I'm glad (I think) for the model that you use to include into Word documents (include the bibliographical info at the moment of citation, and let us edit it) as opposed to, say, the RefWorks method of inserting an ID number and processing it later in one go. Since I work with complicated sources (some primary, some ancient, translated volumes in multi-volume sets which are also part of a series, etc), and since the RefWorks approach would mean that I couldn't have even touched Zotero until it was fully able to get all of that stuff right for my particular citation style. This way, I can have my data in Z., have help getting it out, and still get it right without worrying about whether the program can handle all the quirks of a particular resource. It seems good. But. I'm not sure I like the idea of inserting a citation (for a foot/endnote style) always *as* a footnote. Often in the humanities, footnotes are *notes on the discussion*, which may also happen to include bibliographic pointers to other references. That is, they are not giving reference to a quotation or piece of data in the body of the work, but offering further expansion on a point.
From a technical standpoint, I'd like to be able to decide to add bibliographical information *while* writing or editing a footnote. (and still get an automatic bibliography at the end). Could this be made possible? This would also solve the current problem of not being able to add a second reference to a footnoted citation after the footnote has already been inserted. I realize this makes switching citation styles mid-stream impossible, but with notes like I'm describing, I don't think that's impossible anyway.
"But. I'm not sure I like the idea of inserting a citation (for a foot/endnote style) always *as* a footnote. Often in the humanities, footnotes are *notes on the discussion*, which may also happen to include bibliographic pointers to other references. That is, they are not giving reference to a quotation or piece of data in the body of the work, but offering further expansion on a point."
Keep in mind that in a number of fields (including mine), it is common to use both note and author-date styles. In this context, not doing the footnoting automatically makes changing styles very labor-intensive. It literally means copy-and-pasting every single citation into or out of notes, which can take a lot of time.
As a developer of CSL and OpenDocument and OpenOffice, I have always considered it a major priority to fix this problem, and I'm thrilled to see the Zotero guys do the same. Really, this is a great thing in my view!
So I'd ask that perhaps you help us all figure out how to iron out the kinks rather than to suggest jettisoning the idea. For example, what if you could choose a contextual-menu item that would set it to some in-text style (like "title" or whatever)?
We need to make formatting more automated, rather than accept that things must always be as they've been with Endnote et al.
Absolutely, citation formatting should be automated, so that switching from different styles is made as easy as possible, if not completely trivial. Period.
I don't want to take that away, and I an see that if you want to switch formats, you need it.
But I think I'm right when I say that if I (in a basically footnoting discipline) want to mingle ancillary discussion with bibliographic pointers in a footnote (which I do), I thereby give up on the ability to automatically switch formats, since extracting the references from my footnote text (to add them in Author-date format to the text body) would mangle the footnotes. [[Footnote sample: I find it difficult to agree with Huchinson when he says in *Go on, Make My Day* (Seattle: UWP, 2007), 22, that I eat garbage. Bob Miller "Scot Eats Bugs" *Irregular Journal* 22 (2006), 231, would agree, though I have my own issues with him.]]
All I want from zotero is a model that allows me to give up the feature of automated style-switching by letting me edit all my footnotes as sidenotes-to-the-main-text. Zotero almost does this, since Zotero nicely allows you to edit the citations once it has created them. What I can't do is add a citation to an existing note, whether that note is a text footnote or a citation footnote. There may also be problems associated with adding a note to an existing citation, but I haven't found them yet. Basically as long as we don't have a model where a footnoted citation can only be a citation and nothing more, I'm happy.
@Simon:
Many thanks for your work, which we eagerly await.
Do you mean by "Support for including notes in footnotes is not yet implemented " that you can't yet include notes in footnotes *and preserve those notes when changing citation types*? Adding cheap personal slurs (for example) to zotero-created footnotes appears to work handily already, though I haven't given it extensive tests. Of course if you change citation types you cause yourself some trouble... (which brings me to):
One tiny feature you might sneak into a coming beta of the Word macro is an ("Are you sure?") message when you change the 'properties' value to another citation style. Right now (and until you make the change you mention), it will slurp any added notes away into oblivion. A poor user might want to experiment (if he's feeling cross-disciplinary) to see how his text looks in another format, only to find his clever damning-with-faint-praise footnote citation text has been subjected to a non-reversible deletion!
So there are two ways to add commentary to citations. One is to integrate the citations within the text. The other is to integrate the comments into the citation.
If you have a long commentary that would would put in a footnote anyway (e.g. which would be there regardless of whether you were using a footnote style), then you should be able to do as you would always do: add a footnote, and then your commentary and citation to it. That should definitely work, and Zotero should be able to understand how to handle it (not sure if it does; haven't tried).
You can see some testing I did on this here, and here. Both output documents are generated from the exact same source. Note what happens to the citations in the two notes in the APA style [oops, just noticed a bug with one of those "citations in a footnote"; hopefully you get the idea though].
The conceptual leap is that you just have to understand two kinds of structures: footnotes with citations, and footnoted citations.