Recovering citations from a Zotero Word document

Hi! My colleagues computer crashed (possibly beyond repair). Based on my suggestion she was using Zotero to help her write her thesis, but unfortunately she did not sync her library. She has a back-up of the word document containing some 150 citations. Is there an easy way to "import" citations from a Word document back to Zotero? Does the document itself contain the relevant information or is it lost without a link to the database? Thanks for your help, she's really bummed about it (even though she can always re-insert the citations manually).
  • Thank you Mark. Unfortunately, the extractor says no references were found. Still, the document contains references as fields and when I inspect the field, it contains the full Zotero citation, including abstract in some cases. :-/
  • This is what one expanded field in Word looks like: http://jan.strojil.cz/field.png

    It seems to me that all the information is there and a "reverse import" back to Zotero should be possible.

    In any case, her new library will be synced with her account, lesson learnt (I told her in the first place, but since she was planning on using it only on that one machine, she never set it up).
  • Yeah, that's the information ref extractor uses as far as I know; mayby @Rintze knows what's going on?

    And indeed, more people should know that to sync is to backup...
  • edited December 21, 2016
    @janstrojil, I'd be happy to take a look to see why the extractor tool doesn't work, but I'd have to see the document, or at least a page or two with some active citation fields that look like your screenshot when expanded. Can you share it by email?
  • edited December 26, 2016
    (@janstrojil shared the .docx document with me, and I had no trouble extracting the references with Reference Extractor (in Google Chrome), so my guess is that there was just some kind of browser compatibility issue. It might have been NoScript (which would explain the issue, since the extractor needs client-side JavaScript). I will leave another update if we pin down the exact problem.)
  • Hi Rintze,
    Very nice Reference extractor.
    I have added my reference on google docs and Zotero plugin there. And I have downloaded as a word, seems the links are lost in the process.
    Would be a way to get the references back?
    My computer crashed and my library was not updated o
    Thank you,
    Best
  • @fahsarda: Transferring a document between Google Docs and Word has nothing to do with this. You just have to follow these steps.
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