How do I generate/output a list of all authors in my library?
I want to export a list of every single author, editor, etc., that exists in my library. I don't care about style or what they wrote, I just want a gigantic list of every single author. How can I do this?
(For the curious, I want to go through and clean out my author list manually, renaming e.g., all instances of "Obama, BH" and "Obama, B.H." to my preferred "Obama, Barack H." The list, which I hope to import into Excel, is to help me facilitate this.)
(For the curious, I want to go through and clean out my author list manually, renaming e.g., all instances of "Obama, BH" and "Obama, B.H." to my preferred "Obama, Barack H." The list, which I hope to import into Excel, is to help me facilitate this.)
SELECT DISTINCT lastName, firstName FROM creatorData;
You'll have to figure out the best SQLite client for your use. (You can use the official SQLite command-line client if you know how — that has a tab-separated-values mode.) You'll need to close Zotero (or Firefox, for Zotero for Firefox) first before accessing the database, since Zotero locks it.
SELECT DISTINCT lastName, firstName FROM creatorData
NATURAL JOIN creators WHERE libraryID IS NULL;
(Also, just to note for posterity, these queries will need to change for Zotero 5.0, though Zotero will at some point gain batch-editing functionality and possibly a creators view, both of which would help address your use case.)
It is common that the same author, organization, journal name will be written different in different sources and it is actually part of a good citation work to "standardize" these different writings. Therefore, it would be useful to have a possibility (similar to duplicated items) to create some lists (e.g. of all authors) and then allow easy merging (batch editing the corresponding entries in the background).
Here is a screenshot of how this could look like: http://www.citavi.com/sub/manual5/de/101_managing_lists-6.png
What do you think about this, Dan et al.?