Zotero Online Export problem - bibtex

RdO_edition
Hello Everyone,

I just found out that the bibtex export from Zotero online doesn't take into account the "text" date/year, as "sous presse", and just gives an empty field. Is there a way to force him to work properly ?

Overwise I will have to do some manual zotero .rdf exports and then re-convert them into proper .bib ... Wich is no very fun when you want to work under Overleaf.

Best regards,

Amaury for RdO
  • adamsmith
    Sorry, no, Zotero only exports parseable dates to bibtex. (FWIW, strings in the date field are generally not going to be well supported. status: in press (and along those lines) will work better in general and I think we'd be more likely to support it in export -- it also doesn't currently work in bibtex export though.

    @emilianoeheyns how are you handling this in BBT?
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited March 27, 2019

    Depends on whether the export is for bibtex or biblatex. In either case, BBT tries to parse a date from the datefield; if it finds one:


    • bibtex: year to year, month, if present, to month

    • biblatex: normalized date goes to date

    If BBT can’t parse what’s in the date field, it is output as-is to year in either case. In the case of bibtex, this is a hail-Mary pass in the hopes that bibtex does something sensible, in the case of biblatex, this is stable (specced maybe even) behavior (year is interpreted as a date-ish-but-not-a-date literal value). In this case, sous presse would end up in the year field.

    two special special cases exist:


    • n.d. is output as if it is the valid "year" \bibstring{nodate}

    • today is output as if it is the valid "year" \today

    BBT has its own dateparser; in a lot of cases, behavior will be the same as Zotero's, but in some cases (having to do e.g. with origdates and date ranges) the behaviour can differ.
  • RdO_edition
    Hi again, and thank you for the answers !

    I'm using personnalised natbib styles, so no Biblatex.

    I use betterbibtex (BBT ?) on the Standalone for my personnal works, and I had not this "it's complicated - year" problem there.

    So I suppose I will have to tinker... maybe the "n. d." will sometimes be useful !
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited March 27, 2019
    .n.d. Will also (currently) only work on bbt.

    There are ways to get bbt output elsewhere, but none are as frictionless as the formal zotero api. Auto-export to a Dropbox folder is likely the lowest friction you're going to get for bbt. Other options exists, but they're finicky to set up (using git or proxies to localhost).

    (edit: correct, I usually refer to Better BibTeX as BBT)

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