Fix for bibliography export indentation problem?
Longtime Zotero user and recent paid subscriber here. I've been silently annoyed by the bug with bibliography export and copy-paste for years now. I remember reading somewhere that the fault lies with MS office and Outlook, but as the de facto standard, I wonder if there is a quick fix?
When I export a list of references/copy to clipboard and then paste into an MS office program like outlook email or word, the numbering is always on a separate line and on the right side. Dragging references to the outlook window creates the same issue. It seems silly to have to paste into notepad first before the email as a workaround. It looks sort of like this, but the forums won't let me right justify:
____________________________________________________________________________1.
Patel MS. Change In Length of Stay and Readmissions among Hospitalized Medical Patients after Inpatient Medicine Service Adoption of Mobile Secure Text Messaging. J Gen Intern Med. 2016;31(8):863–70.
____________________________________________________________________________2.
Reeves S, Lewin S. Interprofessional collaboration in the hospital: strategies and meanings. J Health Serv Res Policy. 2004 Oct;9(4):218–25.
____________________________________________________________________________3.
O’Leary KJ. Hospital-Based Clinicians’ Use of Technology for Patient Care-Related Communication: A National Survey. J Hosp Med. 2017;12(7):530–5.
I have this problem with the only biomedical styles I would use in research: Vancouver, AMA, and nature.
Thank you!
When I export a list of references/copy to clipboard and then paste into an MS office program like outlook email or word, the numbering is always on a separate line and on the right side. Dragging references to the outlook window creates the same issue. It seems silly to have to paste into notepad first before the email as a workaround. It looks sort of like this, but the forums won't let me right justify:
____________________________________________________________________________1.
Patel MS. Change In Length of Stay and Readmissions among Hospitalized Medical Patients after Inpatient Medicine Service Adoption of Mobile Secure Text Messaging. J Gen Intern Med. 2016;31(8):863–70.
____________________________________________________________________________2.
Reeves S, Lewin S. Interprofessional collaboration in the hospital: strategies and meanings. J Health Serv Res Policy. 2004 Oct;9(4):218–25.
____________________________________________________________________________3.
O’Leary KJ. Hospital-Based Clinicians’ Use of Technology for Patient Care-Related Communication: A National Survey. J Hosp Med. 2017;12(7):530–5.
I have this problem with the only biomedical styles I would use in research: Vancouver, AMA, and nature.
Thank you!
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/365654/#Comment_365654
No, I don't accept this answer. I've been using this workaround for 3+ years. Microsoft office is a massively used product and Zotero ought to be compatible.
All I want to do is easily copy or drag citations into outlook emails. I bet that MANY academic users of Zotero follow this same workflow. Most large academic institutions use Exchange / office365 and so Outlook is a necessity.
I am begging the zotero developers to please consider this.
We have no control over how HTML we send to the clipboard is parsed by different applications, and we have no way of knowing what application you're going to paste into, even if we could figure out a version that was rendered better by Office. This works pasting into Gmail and Thunderbird (and likely other HTML-based mail programs), so it's certainly possible for an application to support this, and we wouldn't do anything to break that.
This particular problem would only happen with citation styles that format the leading numbers in a left margin. There are plenty of numbered styles that don't try to do that, and you should use one of those for Quick Copy to an application that can't handle the floated-left number. You could probably even modify whatever style you're using to format the numbers differently, though someone else would have to advise you on that.
It's possible there's something we could do to the HTML to get styles that require this formatting to transfer better into Office, but given that the existing markup works with Gmail, Thunderbird, and all web browsers, and any alternative would need to be defaulted off, that's not something we can spend time investigating at the moment. If someone wants to play with this, we'll accept a patch that puts it behind a pref. For now, you should just use a different numeric style.
second-field-align
set, regardless of whether that's set tomargin
orflush
, and pretty much all numeric styles do one or the other, so there really isn't a good option for someone who wants to copy & paste into an MS application (or google docs for that matter) in a numeric style.My very vague understanding of how this works on Windows is that the clipboard can contain multiple formats and will paste in the first format a window accepts, so making rich text/RTF the primary format format could work (but as I said -- pretty vague understanding and no idea how well that'd travel across OSs).
(using
grep --files-without-match second-field-align *.csl|xargs grep -l citation-format=\"numeric\"
)acta-pharmaceutica.csl
acta-scientiae-veterinariae.csl
american-institute-of-physics.csl
american-journal-of-clinical-pathology.csl
american-journal-of-orthodontics-and-dentofacial-orthopedics.csl
american-veterinary-medical-association.csl
anaesthesia.csl
aporia-the-nursing-journal.csl
arthritis-and-rheumatism.csl
avian-diseases.csl
biochemistry.csl
biomed-central.csl
brazilian-journal-of-veterinary-research-and-animal-science.csl
briefings-in-bioinformatics.csl
budownictwo-i-architektura-pl.csl
bulletin-du-centre-detudes-medievales-dauxerre.csl
byzantina-symmeikta.csl
cell-research.csl
cell-transplantation.csl
cellular-and-molecular-bioengineering.csl
chicago-figures.csl
clinical-hemorheology-and-microcirculation.csl
clinical-orthopaedics-and-related-research.csl
clinical-spine-surgery.csl
council-of-science-editors.csl
council-of-science-editors-alphabetical.csl
cultivos-tropicales.csl
cytometry.csl
european-journal-of-immunology.csl
eva-berlin-konferenz.csl
evolutionary-anthropology.csl
eye.csl
french3.csl
french4.csl
frontiers-in-bioscience.csl
geriatrie-et-psychologie-neuropsychiatrie-du-vieillissement.csl
gigascience.csl
gost-r-7-0-5-2008-numeric-alphabetical.csl
grasas-y-aceites.csl
hawaii-international-conference-on-system-sciences-proceedings.csl
human-reproduction-update.csl
interactive-cardiovascular-and-thoracic-surgery.csl
international-journal-of-electronic-commerce.csl
international-journal-of-radiation-oncology-biology-physics.csl
investigative-radiology.csl
iranian-journal-of-basic-medical-sciences.csl
iso690-numeric-en.csl
iso690-numeric-fr.csl
iso690-numeric-lt.csl
iso690-numeric-sk.csl
israel-medical-association-journal.csl
johnson-matthey-technology-review.csl
journal-of-analytical-toxicology.csl
journal-of-antimicrobial-chemotherapy.csl
journal-of-aoac-international.csl
journal-of-atrial-fibrillation.csl
journal-of-chemistry-and-chemical-engineering.csl
journal-of-clinical-oncology.csl
journal-of-environmental-science-and-health-part-b.csl
journal-of-internal-medicine.csl
journal-of-magnetic-resonance-imaging.csl
journal-of-refugee-studies.csl
journal-of-surgery-and-medicine.csl
journal-of-the-american-college-of-cardiology.csl
journal-of-the-american-college-of-surgeons.csl
journal-of-the-american-society-of-brewing-chemists.csl
journal-of-the-electrochemical-society.csl
journal-of-the-european-academy-of-dermatology-and-venereology.csl
journal-of-zoo-and-wildlife-medicine.csl
laboratory-animal-science-professional.csl
laser-and-photonics-reviews.csl
liver-international.csl
magnetic-resonance-in-medicine.csl
magnetic-resonance-materials-in-physics-biology-and-medicine.csl
microbial-cell.csl
multimed.csl
multiple-sclerosis-journal.csl
national-science-foundation-grant-proposals.csl
neurorehabilitation-and-neural-repair.csl
nucleic-acids-research.csl
nucleic-acids-research-web-server-issue.csl
oncoimmunology.csl
ophthalmology.csl
ophthalmology-retina.csl
otto-von-guricke-universitat-magdeburg-medizinische-fakultat-numeric.csl
oxford-university-press-scimed-numeric.csl
pediatric-blood-and-cancer.csl
pediatric-pulmonology.csl
perspectives-on-sexual-and-reproductive-health.csl
photochemistry-and-photobiology.csl
postepy-higieny-i-medycyny-doswiadczalnej.csl
protein-science.csl
radiopaedia.csl
revista-fave-seccion-ciencias-agrarias.csl
revista-materia.csl
revista-virtual-de-quimica.csl
revue-de-medecine-veterinaire.csl
revue-des-etudes-byzantines.csl
science-translational-medicine.csl
springer-physics-brackets.csl
springer-vancouver-brackets.csl
stem-cells-and-development.csl
the-american-journal-of-cardiology.csl
the-american-journal-of-human-genetics.csl
the-febs-journal.csl
the-journal-of-clinical-investigation.csl
the-journal-of-eukaryotic-microbiology.csl
the-journal-of-immunology.csl
the-neuroscientist.csl
the-world-journal-of-biological-psychiatry.csl
traffic-injury-prevention.csl
university-for-the-creative-arts-figures.csl
uspekhi-gerontologii.csl
veterinary-record.csl
vodohospodarske-technicko-ekonomicke-informace.csl
vodohospodarske-technicko-ekonomicke-informace-en.csl
who-europe-numeric.csl
wireless-communications-and-mobile-computing.csl
Thank you both for your comprehensive answers and consideration of this issue.
The most common biomedical styles have this problem including Vancouver, American Medical Association (AMA), and Nature.
Based on the discussion, it sounds like there may be a way for me to customize these styles and remove the "second-field-align set". I don't really get the style editor code. How would we do this on our own setups?
Thank you!!
https://editor.citationstyles.org/searchByName/
- find the style you want to modify and click on Edit
- click on "Info" on the left and change the title at the bottom right
- click on "Bibliography" on the left and set second-field-align to blank at the bottom right
- click on Style at the top left, and click on "Save style" (accept the suggested changes to id and link)
- double-click the downloaded file to install into Zotero
While this doesn't look good for an in-paper bibliography, it works great as an "export only" style for emails and such. Thanks!