Automatic exporting with autor-year instead of author-date using betterbibtex

luis.nando
Dear all,

Could you please shed some light in my attempt to migrate from Mendeley to Zotero?

Mendeley exports the bib file with a year field, betterbibtex, however, exports with a date field. This is not compatible with natbib, which is the package that I use to handle my citations (or at least hours of googling did not turn out anything relevant).

What am I missing, I cannot find a way to either make natbib recognize date instead of year or make betterbibtex export as year instead of date.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
  • noksagt
    You should use the BBT GitHub if this is an issue with that plugin. Verify you're exporting to BibTeX (which defaults to using year and month fields in stock Zotero) and not BibLaTeX (which defaults to using date in stock Zotero).
  • adamsmith
    Better BibTeX does this correctly, too, behaving exactly like stock Zotero export in this respect:
    - in Better BibTeX, dates are exported with separate year, month, and, day components
    - in Better BibLaTeX, dates are exported in a single, standardized date field.

    If you're getting date, you're exporting BibLaTeX
  • luis.nando
    Thank you, now I understand.

    Issue fixed.
  • emilianoeheyns
    @adamsmith is correct; see also https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/25701/bibtex-vs-biber-and-biblatex-vs-natbib .

    If you have to (I am sorry) or prefer (why though?) use natbib, you have to choose either "BibTeX" or "Better BibTeX" to get natbib-compatible output. Looks like Mendeley either defaults to bibtex or can only do bibtex if that's what you're getting on export.

    (there is one exception to the rules outlined by @adamsmith though: if what's in the date can not be recognized as a date, BBT exports it to the "year" field even in biblatex; it's a fallback for when you want verbatim "dates" like "forthcoming" and such)
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