Inserting citations into Word

cbblanke
I am getting started with Word citations and zotero, so apologies if this should be obvious. I have the bibliographic data for a journal article in zotero. I am using Microsoft Word for Mac (2011). When I try to insert a citation using the script menu, it makes one, but it does not add it to my existing list of citations (made without zotero). I am using the IEEE style (sequential numbers) and it makes a new citation number one even tough it should be the seventh citation in my list. How can I fix this?
  • cbblanke
    In other words, the Bibliography that zotero makes is independent of the one I already made in Word.
  • alandsloane
    Zotero and MS Word's bibliography are totally separate things. In my experience Word's own bibliography manager is entirely unreliable, buggy and gets a great deal of the formatting wrong. Personally, I advise my students never to use it.
    I don't know what one should do if you've already got a lot of data stored in Word's Bibliography manager. Poking around it seems that it stores the data in XML format (Manage Sources>Browse ...), so with a little programming you might hope to convert it to RIS or similar which could then be imported into Zotero?
  • cbblanke
    Well, the nice thing about the Word one is that is it is already included in the program, so I can use it in a collaboration without my collaborator having Zotero. It would be so useful if it could just import bibliographic data but I don't think it can. OTOH Zotero would be incredibly useful if it could integrate with this feature that is now built in to every version of Word. It seems like they are so close to working together the way I want but I can't figure out how to bridge that gap.
  • bwiernik
    They really aren't close to working together at all. There is no way that any external software can communicate with the Word bibliography feature. Working with the native Word bibliography feature is really not that much better than just typing the references by hand--you have to enter most of the information manually and, as alandsloane mentions, anything but the most basic formatting is usually wrong. That is why every reference management software (Zotero, Mendeley, Papers, Endnote, Refworks, etc.) uses their own citation engine.

    If you have a Word bibliography already entered, you can follow some of the suggestions in this thread to export it to a format that can be imported into Zotero.
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/20310/
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