OUTPUT Style, Comma Delimited vs CSV

hakrip
Hello,

We have a database that only reads the "Comma delimited" output style from Reference manager 12 (Refman). We are trying to convert to Zotero, but the CSV format (that we assumed was equivalent to "comma delimited") is not readable by our database.

My question is: does anyone know the difference between the "comma delimited" and CSV formats? If so, is it possible to tweak the Zotero output style?

  • bwiernik
    "Comma delimited" and "CSV" are the same thing. The problem is that that is not a structured bibliographic format like RIS, CSL JSON, BibTeX, etc. It's just outputting the item data to columns in a spreadsheet. It's almost certain that different reference managers would export data with different column names, in different orders, etc.

    You could use Zotero to export to CSV, then open up the exported file in a spreadsheet editor like Excel and edit the column names/reorder the columns to match the format used by Refman 12.

    What tool are you using that requires such a non-standard data format?
  • adamsmith
    CSV is comma delimited, but "comma delimited" isn't actually a data format; it's just a file format that can hold any sort of tabular information and there's no standardized CSV for bibliographic information. You could try to see if you can get a copy of a Refman12 comma delimited file and then reverse engineer that from Zotero's CSV output, but I'm afraid that's the best we can offer.

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