Tags not importing properly - trying to switch from Mendeley to Zotero

tomgoodell
I've been a Mendeley user for about a year and want to switch to Zotero. I have about 530 entries in my Mendeley database, almost all of which have PDFs attached. All of the records in Mendeley are tagged with one or more tags. I've exported my Mendeley database to RIS format, and all of the PDFs appear to come in to Zotero, but a lot of the records are missing tags. The tags are missing from both parent record and child PDF record in Zotero. If it was just a few records I could update manually, but it appears to be about 300 records that are missing their tags.

If I export my Mendeley database to bib format the tags appear to come in properly, but I lose the PDFs.

Any suggestions as to how to get both PDFs and tags to import would be much appreciated.
  • adamsmith
    both Tags in RIS and attachments in bibtex should work.
    Could you open both .ris and .bib export in a text editor (notepad, TextEdit) and copy one entry that has tags that don't import (for RIS) and a PDF that doesn't import (for .bib) here?
  • tomgoodell
    Here are the contents of the .bib file; this does not import a PDF file:

    @article{Baum2016,
    author = {Baum, Dan},
    file = {:C$\backslash$:/Users/Tom/Dropbox/Linden Leadership/Mendeley Docs/Legalize It All, by Dan Baum {\_} Harper's Magazine.pdf:pdf},
    journal = {Harpers},
    keywords = {Culture,Drugs,Health},
    mendeley-tags = {Culture,Drugs,Health},
    pages = {1--17},
    title = {{[ Report ] | Legalize It All , by Dan Baum}},
    year = {2016}
    }


    Here are the contents of the .ris file, same record, that doesn't import tags:
    TY - JOUR
    T1 - [ Report ] | Legalize It All , by Dan Baum
    A1 - Baum, Dan
    Y1 - 2016///
    JF - Harpers
    SP - 1
    EP - 17
    L1 - file:///C:/Users/Tom/Dropbox/Linden Leadership/Mendeley Docs/Legalize It All, by Dan Baum _ Harper's Magazine.pdf
    ER -
  • noksagt
    You'll need to consult Mendeley's support resources, as this appears to be an issue with their exporters:

    The RIS file that you give doesn't include tags for Zotero to import.

    The BibTeX file erroneously uses TeX-entities in the file link (no other client I know of does this).
  • adamsmith
    It should be easy enough to get the bibtex working though. Given that this has been an issue in Mendeley for something like 5 years, I doubt they'll fix it quickly. I'll give you a good search&replace string
  • tomgoodell
    Thank you - that would be great! I'm excited about moving to Zotero; I'm a big fan of open source, and some of the changes that Mendeley has made have made it less useful for me. I do appreciate the help from both noksagt and adamsmith.
  • adamsmith
    so this might be a bit more complicated than I thought, but let's try[1]:
    What the full filepath to the Legalize It All, by Dan Baum {\_} Harper's Magazine.pdf file? -- most importantly, what's the actual filename?

    [1] For those interested, Zotero actually handles that weird backslash escaping Mendeley does already:
    https://github.com/zotero/translators/blob/master/BibTeX.js#L404
    the problem may be other escaping like that underscore.
  • tomgoodell
    The full path is:

    C:\Users\Tom\Dropbox\Linden Leadership\Mendeley Docs\Legalize It All, by Dan Baum _ Harper's Magazine.pdf

    The underscore is part of the filename - Mendeley created it that way.
  • adamsmith
    could you try importing that bibtex with an unescaped underscore, i.e. just _ instead of {\_} -- does that work?
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