Dragging or copying citations into Word

benifex
I've been trying to work out how to dragging or copy citations into Word because it seems it would be considerably faster than using the Add/Edit Citation dialogue in some circumstances (my library is quite large so lookup takes a while). I'm using Word 365 under Windows 10.

However, when I use ctrl-shift-C to copy items into Word, it pastes in an entire bibliography entry. When I use shift+drag, it gives me a plain text citation like [1] rather than what I want, which is a citation field with the corresponding entry added to the bibliography.

Do I need to change some settings? Or is this just not functionality which Zotero offers?
  • adamsmith
    This won't work, yes. Drag and Shift+drag give you just the citation as text, no connection to Zotero. The Word add-on is the only way to do that.
  • benifex
    Thanks for the quick response!

    Is something like this possible as a feature in future versions of Zotero?
  • bwiernik
    Live citations and bibliographies in Word require using the Zotero plugin in Word. It will not be possible to create the complex fields that Word requires by drag and drop, no.
  • makislog
    Is it possible to adjust Zotero to have the in-text citetion by just dragging it (instead of Shift+drag)?
  • adamsmith
    No, sorry. Note that there's also a keyboard shortcut for copy citation
  • CordaroG
    I found this discussion because I was looking at how to change this drag-and-drop setting. It would be very useful, especially when adding more than 1 reference at the same position in the text.

    I was using EndNote before, and it allows this option (random info for reverse engineering)

    In addition, I would love a quick setting for choosing how to visualize the reference in the text, such as [1] or [author_year_title], to be able to verify that you added the correct references when reviewing your final file.
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