Upgrade StorageMigrating from RefWorks to Zotero
Hi All;
I am an occasional user of reference management software and have been wrestling with RefWorks for many hours over the past few months. Yesterday I got fed up, searched for another option (other than paying $$$ for EndNote), and found Zotero. Eureka! Within two hours I felt like I really understood how to use Zotero - at least for my simple purposes. Now I want to migrate my entire RefWorks database/library/catalog into Zotero.
My question is the best strategy? I tried searching the forums for advice, but didn't find much. If I'm duplicating earlier conversations, my apologies - just point me in the correct direction.
The obvious first step would be to download my RefWorks info as an RIS file and import into Zotero. I have done with with about a half-dozen test files and it is easy, but does it capture the most complete data? Another option seems to be dragging the PDF from my hard drive into Zotero. That imports a reference, but the title field isn't "clean" (ie: where an apostrophe s should be, it inserts ’s). A third option is to search databases on the web for all of my references, and adding them directly from the journal - that is, importing them "from scratch" as it were.
I don't have a huge set of references, but certainly a couple of hundred. Also, note that most of what I have are journal articles; a few news sources, and one movie.
Other strategies? General advice on migrating?
Thanks!
Tres
I am an occasional user of reference management software and have been wrestling with RefWorks for many hours over the past few months. Yesterday I got fed up, searched for another option (other than paying $$$ for EndNote), and found Zotero. Eureka! Within two hours I felt like I really understood how to use Zotero - at least for my simple purposes. Now I want to migrate my entire RefWorks database/library/catalog into Zotero.
My question is the best strategy? I tried searching the forums for advice, but didn't find much. If I'm duplicating earlier conversations, my apologies - just point me in the correct direction.
The obvious first step would be to download my RefWorks info as an RIS file and import into Zotero. I have done with with about a half-dozen test files and it is easy, but does it capture the most complete data? Another option seems to be dragging the PDF from my hard drive into Zotero. That imports a reference, but the title field isn't "clean" (ie: where an apostrophe s should be, it inserts ’s). A third option is to search databases on the web for all of my references, and adding them directly from the journal - that is, importing them "from scratch" as it were.
I don't have a huge set of references, but certainly a couple of hundred. Also, note that most of what I have are journal articles; a few news sources, and one movie.
Other strategies? General advice on migrating?
Thanks!
Tres
In my post, I complained about odd characters being added when I did a drag-n-drop from a PDF (it was a problem with an apostrophe S). The characters I see in my Zotero library are & r s q u o ; s (without the spaces). It seems that the forum software automatically changed that, so that in the post it reads as an 's. I presume that the forum took care of the format coding, but not so in my library.
If I try to insert the offending reference into a test document, the citation in the paper's bibliography shows the formatting code, not the correct 's.
As I said, this is just interesting. My main goal here is advice on migrating to Zotero.
Thanks!
Tres
Going forward, the best method to import items is using the Zotero button in your browser from the publisher page for the article.
The issue with the apostrophe S is that my citation imported into Zotero shows formatting code, not the apostrophe character. The interesting part is that when I try to reproduce that for the forum, the code gets converted, correctly, into the apostrophe. That's all.
Thanks!