Delete all citations altogether

Rafael.Pereira
Is it possible to remove all the citations altogether from a word document without having to delete them one by one?

An example of what I'd like to do:


BEFORE: "As analysed by Black (2001), this phenomenon contradicts previous findings from the literature (Green, 1990; Smith, 1993)"

AFTER: "As analysed by Black, this phenomenon contradicts previous findings from the literature"
  • adamsmith
    no, sorry. You could, I suppose, use a citation style that has a less commonly used format -- e.g. IEEE which has [1] for citations -- and then use a wildcard search&replace function to delete all references, but you'd have to figure out the details of how to do this in your word processor yourself.
  • DWL-SDCA
    Allow me to ask a couple of questions.

    Do you want to remove the citations before or after you have issued the command to strip out the Zotero codes (after clicking the right-most Zotero toolbar icon)?

    More importantly, please say why you want to remove all citations. It may be that there is an easy way to accomplish what you want by another means.

    One more thing: please be careful with what you do with a manuscript that was drafted with references but no longer has references and a bibliography. Don't share the document or risk being accused of plagiarism.
  • Rafael.Pereira
    adamsmith , Thank you for your suggestion. I think this would be the easiest way. I think the best option in this case might NATURE's style, which only uses one numeral per citation

    DWL-SDCA, thank you for the heads up. My intention is to remove the references to send the document to an editorial service. They charge by # of words and that why I would like to take references out of the document.
  • underdog
    I too would like to see a feature in Zotero that allows the removal of all citations with a single click, and I have a legitimate reason for it. The reason indeed involves plagiarism, but not in the manner described by other posters.

    If I'm sending out a book for blurbs before it's published, I don't know who actually ends up with my manuscript in their hands. It's entirely possible that one would copy my entire book and claim it as their own or sell it to an unscrupulous literary agent who gives the project to another writer.

    One way I can protect myself from this is to leave out the citations from review copies of the book. This way, if someone wants to steal my work, they will have no idea what sources I cited. This has two effects. First, it greatly increases the difficulty of simply copying my book outright. They would have to find every single source I used or their equivalents. The extra effort required may discourage them from plagiarizing in the first place. Second, if the case goes to court, I can produce the actual citations, on file with a neutral third party, as evidence that I was the one who authored the book.

    If my manuscript is done, I'd really appreciate being able to save one copy with citations, strip out all the citations, then save a second copy. Right now, I have to delete every single citation by hand to accomplsih the same thing.
  • adamsmith
    See above -- use Nature style, don't insert or delete the bibliography at the end. Two clicks, but that really does seem easy enough for your use case.
  • underdog
    edited May 25, 2015
    That sounds helpful, but I don't think there's an easy way to convert a document from one citation format to another. Thus, if the publisher demands a different type of format like APA, using Nature wouldn't really help unless you can convert all the citations in the document from Nature to APA with one click. I just made a feature suggestion for this, so it might be more helpful to continue the discussion there:

    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/49603/strip-out-all-citations-from-a-document-with-one-click/
  • adamsmith
    edited May 25, 2015
    I don't think there's an easy way to convert a document from one citation format to another.
    of course there is. That's one of the major reasons for using a reference manager. "Set Document Preferences" in the Word/LibreOffice add-on and select the style you want.

    As for the aesthetic reason you cite in the other thread, follow the advice above and use search&replace to remove citations.
    This is a very, very rarely requested feature, suitable for very ideosyncratic circumstances -- using some type of workaround like what I describe above is the way to go.

    Adding this as a feature would in all likelihood be quite costly in terms of user experience and time spent on support for people who don't understand the feature or use it by accident.
  • underdog
    Ok, I'll admit I was wrong about the document preferences, but is using the feature by accident really that big of a deal? You can easily reverse it with a simple undo in any modern word processor, right?

    Zotero is GPLed. If development time is an issue, would you accept a code submission from a user who implemented the feature themselves?
  • dstillman
    No, sorry, not going to add this as a feature given the ease of the workarounds.
  • philsc
    What about removing all citations in order to get a wordcount that doesn't include citations?
  • adamsmith
    Answered philsc here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/47251/word-count/#Item_6
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