Editing the citations in someone else's paper

jongiff
I am editing a paper written by a colleague. Some of the Zotero items are not citing properly. For example, one of the references is (Smith, John C. 1989), but should rightfully be (Smith 1989). Probably the name format in the Zotero entry is incorrect.

Is there a way for me to edit this without unlinking or creating a shared library? I recall that there may once have been something called a traveling library (approximately) that traveled with the paper and that it was possible to edit that. But I may be misrecalling or it may no longer be available.

The paper is written in Word. The citation style is Springer - Basic (author-date).

Thank you.
  • adamsmith
    Is there a way for me to edit this without unlinking or creating a shared library? I recall that there may once have been something called a traveling library (approximately) that traveled with the paper and that it was possible to edit that. But I may be misrecalling or it may no longer be available.
    I'm afraid not, no. Zotero embeds the citations in Word fields (see https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/word_field_codes ) and there's no way to modify them there with any reasonable interface. Having access to the library from which they were inserted is the only way.
  • jongiff
    Thanks for the quick reply, adamsmith. As a Zotero for lifer (or this life, anyway), it would sure be nice to find a way to do this more easily. In this case, the student who wrote it originally is long gone, and may not be using Zotero presently, so tracking down the original is a lot of work. I know I can unlink in the end and edit the citations directly, so there is a way to solve the problem.

    Thanks and thanks for Zotero.
  • adamsmith
    Document collections, which would allow this (basically, you'd click a button "create collection from document" and have a new collection with all items cited in a document) are generally planned and have been for quite some time. No idea if this is more like a "next year" or "next decade" type of feature though.
    The technical basics are easy (I think juris-m even used to have a basic version a while back), but both conceptually and in terms of UI there are some thornier issues.
  • maier.de
    As @adamsmith points out, a similar feature exists in Juris-M. On the other hand, this tool https://rintze.zelle.me/ref-extractor/ will allow you to extract references from a paper. I'm not sure whether the references will be properly linked to the citation in your document.
  • bwiernik
    They won’t be linked to the document.
  • François Maurice
    Hi,

    For those interested, the tweak by Frank Bennett with Juris-M works well. There is two methods. If you don't need Juris-M, use the second method. So, now you can extract citation information from a Word document AND the citations stay linked between the document and Zotero.

    Here's the address: https://juris-m.readthedocs.io/en/latest/jurism-extras.html

    Françcois
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