Exporting ALL fields to BibTeX (esp Shorttitle, Translator)

I may just be missing something here, but I seem to lose data when exporting to BibTeX from Zotero. Why wouldn't Zotero just export *every* field it has for a reference? The "Short Title" field, for example, is used by the MLA biblatex style for BibTeX. I type it in Zotero (or, actually, have a translator figure it out more often), only to have to type it into BibTeX again.

The same is true for the "Translator" field. Zotero lets me specify a person as a Translator (not an author), but by the time it gets to BibTeX, the translator has magically become an author and moved to the front of the citation (as opposed to buried behind the title). So, in BibDesk, I have to repeat what I did in Zotero.

If I'm doing something wrong, what is it?

If it's Zotero that isn't exporting this data, why on earth would it not? So please, make it do so!

PS: let me throw my weight behind user-generated keys for references. The underscores zotero introduces breaks my xslts
  • I encounter the same problem. Zotero does not export "short title" to the "Refer" format either. I am using Mellel with Bookends but I would like to use Zotero as my main reference manager. Manually adding "short title" to the whole library after export and import into Bookends would be quite impossible. Please let us know if this problem is being noticed by developers. Thanks!
  • Yes! Please fix this.
    I'm using jurabib with BibTeX and for that I really need the shorttitle field.
    Wouldn't it be easiest that Zotero just exports *all* the fields to BibTeX? I don't really see a point in Zotero losing certain fields when exporting to BibTeX.

    I'd like to repeat mysheepb's last sentence: "Please let us know if this problem is being noticed by developers. Thanks!" This really would be good to know. I can't use Zotero until this is fixed, because my citations depend on the shorttitle-field.
  • edited October 6, 2008
    I'm not a developer, but I've developed a solution.

    All file and folder names are relative to your profile folder (e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\John\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\nsa54zvf.default\).

    [This process is not recommended. See below. – DS]

    Backup your Zotero collection.
    Shut down Firefox.
    Delete the "zotero" folder.
    Copy this file to your "extensions\zotero@chnm.gmu.edu\" folder (Ignore security and overwrite errors).
    Restart Firefox.
    Import your backup of the collection.
    Barring anything going horribly wrong, you now can translators and short titles to BibTeX!

    This only works on Zotero 1.0.7. To make it work with other versions, you'll have to patch "scraper.sql" with this patch instead of replacing it.
  • Thanks a lot tjbk123!
  • tjbk123's suggestion is not recommended—among other things, by backing up to RDF and reimporting, you'll lose any links to references in your Word/OOo documents, and installing translators from a third-party site is a security risk. (And if one wanted to make a change to scrapers.sql, the correct process would be to overwrite it and then use Reset Translators and Styles in the Advanced pane of the Zotero prefs, not to wipe out the entire database and storage directory.)

    To get the latest version of the BibTeX translator in 1.0.*, you need to upgrade to the latest 1.0 dev build (or, soon, 1.0.8) and click Reset Translators and Styles. If tjbk123's patch has additional fixes, we'll review them and get them in.
  • It seems to me that tjbk123's patch has not been incorporated into 1.0.9. I patched it myself and found it very helpful. Hope it will be there in the next release.
  • Neither the patch nor the complete file mentioned by tjbk123 seem to be available any longer. Can anyone suggest any other way to export the full Zotero info (short title, call number, etc.) into BibTex?
  • What is the state of affairs with exporting the full Zotero info to BibTex?
  • call numbers get exported, but not short titles, and not series numbers, or translators.
  • My comment in the other thread re. translators also applies to short titles: there is not standard method of including them in BibTeX. It would be worth looking at the most popular methods for including them.
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