Converting cites in Word footnotes to in-text cites

Lirazel65
I'm a philosophy MS who now works as a part-time academic editor for a few former professors. I'm also in my 60s and had a full career as a specialized software technical writer, but I'm not a programmer and really, really can't deal with writing scripts. There's only so much of my life left!
My employer(s) write in Word, don't use other automated tools, and use the sort of formatting they are used to and/or developed themselves. It becomes my problem to edit their formatting into conformity with their publishers' standards. Since they write for many different journals, this is a not insignificant problem.
Zotero works well when the footnote I have includes a link -- but I haven't been able to figure out a way to take a citation in one (probably idiosyncratic) format in Word and convert it to another (probably publication-specific) format in a Zotero citation list. Is there a way to do this?
  • bwiernik
    How exactly is the citation in Word? Just as regular text or inserted using Word’s bibliography feature?
  • Lirazel65
    There are footnotes created with Word's References --> Insert Footnotes tool, and a separate Word document with a list of references. That's like a bibliography, but it's formatted as the publisher wants it (a modified Harvard format.) No metadata or markings of any sort. (I've never gotten Word's bibliography tool to work well, and I've been using the program since 1987.)
  • adamsmith
    edited February 4, 2021
    Still struggling to follow.
    I understand that you have a document with plain text references in footnotes in some custom style.

    But this
    and a separate Word document with a list of references. That's like a bibliography, but it's formatted as the publisher wants it (a modified Harvard format.)
    are those just the instructions by the publisher, i.e. a random set of references, or are those the items referenced in the paper?

    Just to manage expectations, Zotero will definitely not be able to automate the process of converting plain text footnotes into any other form of citations, footnotes or otherwise. It's possible that it can save you some time creating the new references, but it'll definitely involve manual steps.
  • Lirazel65
    The publisher requires in-text citations with a separate "References" document. The writer has put all the citations in as footnotes, with bibliographic details. So, I have to create an in-text citation from the footnotes, confirm that the information is complete and correctly formatted in the references list, and then delete the footnote.

    I don't think Zotero is going to be much help, though I'm hopeful for future projects. But thank you for your help; at least I have correct expectations now.
  • adamsmith
    What you could try is turning to footnotes into endnotes so they're all in one place, then using https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_formatted_bibliographies to get the metadata into Zotero and use that to create the correctly formatted and complete list of references. That'll still leave you to do the in-text citations manually. I don't see a way around that.
  • Lirazel65
    Thank you, I'll try that. Every little bit helps!
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