MSWord Plugin: Using Braces as Placeholders like in Endnote

mattica
The one thing I miss about Endnote - doesn't seem hard to implement, and apologies if this has already been discussed.
When typing in Word I don't want to interrupt my train-of-thought so I got used to adding a searchable note in braces (curly brackets) that Endnote would later come back and try to find a match for. This is preferable to: stop typing, click around in Zotero until found, resume typing.
Example:
I'd type:"
This is a counter argument to the conclusions drawn in {smith 2007 history}.
"
After typing for the day or the week or whatever. Zotero could later search the document for braces and go to the library and use the included words in a search. Very handy, eh!
What do you say? Can it be done?
  • Tjowens
    Such functionality does in fact exist. http://www.zotero.org/support/rtf_scan
  • adamsmith
    Trevor - no, not really: The RTF scan does not insert Zotero citations - unfortunately - but just formatted citations.
    That's a big difference, because it means that you can't work with them, reformat them etc. Imho that means that the workflow described above isn't possible with the rtf scan.

    Another isadvantage of this is that you can't actually use it to transform a document with citations (e.g. from another reference manager) into a document linked to Zotero etc.
  • mattica
    I suppose this does require another button on the Word plugin bar.

    If not curly braces - is there something I can type in-line that, maybe, Zotero would recognize as one of its own fields? and therefore, automatically inquire me about it?
  • mattica
    It seems silly for me to reply again, but I'm still curious about this. I would like to gather some momentum behind it - I feel I can't be the only one who would appreciate this.
  • bdarcus
    Here's a plan I'd like to see implemented, in sequence:

    1. consider switching the rtfscan syntax to the almost done pandoc markdown extension syntax (though note this relies on keys to access items; might need to allow other options)

    2. add support for this syntax to the Word and OOo plugins such that do as mattica suggests

    3. maybe referring back to item 1, some way to help entry via in-place auto-completion of some sort

  • danuel
    This would be a useful feature. Better is ability to scan any document, and match the references in Zotero database. Recognize major markups (e.g Refmanager, Endnote fields) automatically, or ask use re how in-text citation is marked. If marked by numbers (e.g. [1], (1), or superscript), then look for the references/bibliography section at end of document and try and match them to Zotero database.
  • fthielen
    Ten years later I want to revive this discussion.

    Is anyone aware of such a feature? It would really help a lot to switch to "unformatted" citation like in EndNote. There you switch to something like:

    {Author, 2020 #1} where #1 is the number of reference as added in EndNote. This field is recognised when te references are formatted in Word.
  • bwiernik
    edited March 2, 2020
    If you mean that you want to insert citations that are plain text that can later be converted to proper citations, without having to use Zotero's word processor plugin each time, see the ODF Scan plugin: http://zotero-odf-scan.github.io/zotero-odf-scan/

    If you just mean you want to speed things up by saving the time for Zotero to format citations each time you insert one, disable the "Automatically update citations" option from the Document Preferences window. That will insert the citations in the selected style format, but they will be underlined to indicate they may be out of date.
  • dstillman
    (Or the more basic built-in RTF Scan feature, which doesn't require using LibreOffice.)
  • proshano
    Bookends for Mac does this too and that is the main reason I use it.
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