DOI Hyperlinks in MS Word Bibliography

Hi all,

Is this thread STILL the last word on how to make MS word citations have the DOI's appear as hyperlinks? https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/77079/ms-word-macro-to-convert-zotero-citations-into-clickable-hyperlinks

With all the updates going on with the upcoming v6 release, there really needs to be a citation style fix that allows DOI's (and URL's, but for academic writing it really is all about the DOIs) to inserted as clickable hyperlinks, which does NOT require an Unlink Citations step. Perhaps there is some technical hurdle that makes this "impossible", but I find it very very hard to believe.

If anyone has any insight into this or has found a painless workaround, I would love to hear it.
  • Nothing new on this. It's definitely not a trivial issue, given how Zotero's citation generation works, no.
  • Is there a way to take a Zotero bibliography that is already in Word, and place all of the files into a single folder within zotero automatically or with a few clicks? Presumably, you could then select all the papers and then export the bibliography to clipboard (which DOES preserve the DOI URLs), and paste that back into the word doc. Obviously, this would flatten the citations (again) and be worthless when in-text citations are numbered instead of using author year (Smith et al., 2022) designations. Unless there is a way to order the exported folder contents in the order in which the citations appear in the original bibliography....
  • That's possible, but unnecessarily involved (and also, Word does some problematic things when copying the HTML from Zotero from the clipboard). To get the same, you don't need to unlink citations in the document, either, you can just unlink the bibliography. So:
    1. Select the bibliography
    2. Press ctrl+shift+F9 (or ctrl+shift+FN+F9 depending on your settings) to remove the field codes in the bibliography -- the bibliography should no longer show as shaded
    3. Keeping the bibliography selected, click Autoformat (which in newer Word version, you'll need to add to a Ribbon of your choice once).

    This whole process takes 10 seconds at most, so not sure the inability of Zotero to do this out of the box is such a big deal.
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