List of authors

aliakhavan89
Hi folks,

Hope this won’t be a redundant post. I was wondering whether there is a way to list all the authors in the library? I mean all authors, no matter first, 2nd, etc.

Any comments are apprecitated in advance.
Regards,
Ali
  • adamsmith
    Not easily, no. Best I can think of would be
    1) Export to .csv
    2) Delete everything but author column
    3) Further split the author column into individual authors
    4) Use a tool like R or OpenRefine to deduplicate authors (or maybe Excel can do that too?)
  • bwiernik
    You could also access the Zotero API using R (https://github.com/giocomai/zoteroR) or python (https://github.com/urschrei/pyzotero) to get the items in a library and then pull out the list of authors.
  • djross3
    Minor additions:
    1. Auto-complete for authors will show you all names if you supply the first letter. Do that 26 times for each letter (or more if you happen to have any in non-English letters) and you'll get a full list of names. It won't be strictly authors (editors, etc., will be included), but it will allow you to view all candidates to fill in. It's not easy to extract that information to a text document though.
    2. @adamsmith yes, Excel can de-duplicate on it's own. Harder to split the names there though, so I'd use a text editor to pre-process the list before de-duplicating, but it can work.
  • dstillman
    @aliakhavan89: If you're still looking for a way to do this, you can install the Zotero beta, set devtools.chrome.enabled to true in the Config Editor in the Advanced pane of the Zotero preferences, restart Zotero, and then open Run JavaScript from the Tools menu. Then paste in the following and click Run:

    var names = await Zotero.DB.columnQueryAsync("SELECT DISTINCT TRIM(firstName || ' ' || lastName) AS creator FROM creators WHERE creatorID IN (SELECT creatorID FROM itemCreators JOIN items USING (itemID) WHERE libraryID=1) ORDER BY creator");
    return names.join('\n');

    You'll get a list of all creators (including editors, etc.) in your personal library.

    If you don't want to stay on the beta, you can switch back to the release version, and you can set devtools.chrome.enabled back to false to remove some extra commands from the Tools menu.

    (For people already on the beta who want to try this, update to the latest beta version first.)
  • aliakhavan89
    Wonderful! I'll try that and may provide feedback.
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