Mendeley to Zotero

epeva
edited January 26, 2023
[Admin note, Jan. 2023: This thread was referring to an old version of the Mendeley importer and is no longer relevant.]

Hello,

I am trying to migrate from Mendeley to Zotero. I don't like how Elsevier is leading Mendeley and making this more difficult to "escape" from Mendeley in the future.

I have followed the guide from here: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/mendeley_import

I am able to perform all steps but Mendeley 1.18 does not automatically sync the whole library PDFs. I have almost 2000 items and only around 1000 PDFs are synced.

Do you have any idea about how to automatically sync all the PDFs for the zotero import?
Many thanks
  • dstillman
    You're saying that you're syncing Mendeley but some files are still missing locally after syncing?

    I'm afraid that'd really be a question for Mendeley support. All we do on our end is import the files that are available locally.
  • Tomasz Raburski
    You may try migration through BibTex

    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/79961/mendeley-to-zotero-through-bibtex#latest
  • bwiernik
    Exporting to BibTeX won’t be any better than the recommended import method if the files aren’t synced locally.
  • epeva
    Thanks for the comments.
    @dstillman I was following the guide that is recommended in the zotero wiki. But it seems like Mendeley is making some additional changes and now, after a fresh syncthing on Mendeley 1.18, roughly half of my library was synced. So I couldn't import all the files. I found no way of doing the full syncthing (tried several times, in Windows and Linux).

    @"Tomasz Raburski" and @bwiernik I was exploring different options and I found the right way. I will explain in case it is useful for someone else.

    1. With the latest version of Mendeley running (1.19.6) and fully synced, I unencrypted (and backed up) the database by following this guide: https://eighty-twenty.org/2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db
    It was a bit tricky because I had the $1 = 8 issue but it is explained how to solve it. It was important that all PDFs were organized in the same folder (see 3).

    2. I originally tried the menextract2pdf tool to export the annotated PDFs. However, depending on the computer (I had Linux and Windows ones, and the version), it only exported a small proportion. The ones exported were different in every version-operating system case. In addition, if there was some special symbols in the names such as é, it failed. But I found this wonderful tool: https://github.com/Xunius/Menotexport With it, and the unencrypted database (in 1), I was able to export all PDFs with the annotations (the only option in Menotexport I used) in a way that can be further edited (not as exported in Mendeley).

    3. Once I had all the PDFs with the annotations, I replaced all PDFs in the original Mendeley folder (the folder that the mendeley database refers to).

    4. I imported the unencrypted database (from 1) into Zotero (PDFs already contained the annotations).

    5. That's all. I made it to export everything and not losing any information.

    Hope it helps someone. Hope I got rid of all Mendeley-related things on time.
This discussion has been closed.