Zotero fails to include volume titles in .bib

Hello,
I'm working with RMarkdown and Zotero as my library, wich is working quite nice. I just noted, that all the volume titles are missing in the bibliography after rendering the document. First I thought it's the .csl which is at fault (using taylor-and-francis-harvard-v) but when I checked the .bib file, I saw that the titles were not included.

An exampe:
@inbook{pelegrin2000,
title = {Les techniques de débitage laminaire au Tardiglaciaire: critères de diagnose et quelques réflexions},
author = {Pelegrin, Jacques},
editor = {Valentin, Boris and Bodu, Pierre and Christensen, Marianne},
year = {2000},
date = {2000},
pages = {73{\textendash}86},
series = {Mémoires du Musée de Préhistoire d'lle de France},
address = {Nemours}

Thats how the file looks for all the @inbook, clearly missing the title after the editior. Has someone a suggestion how I can change that, so I don't have to manualy add the titles after finishing the writing process?
  • Could you describe your exact workflow? Afaik, RStudio's Zotero integration doesn't use Bibtex at all (it uses CSL JSON to be lossless)
  • RStudio defaults to .bib, but you should definitely change the file type to either .json or .yaml. Pandoc will convert the BibTeX back to JSON/YAML anyway, but this conversion is lossy and will tend to produce incorrect citations for unusual items
  • Thanks for the quick answeres.

    @adamsmith: I'm not completely sure how it works either. I connected Zotero to R via Better BibTex, so when im writing in the visual mode, I have acces to my library and can add citations automatically. They will then be included in the .bib file and compiled according to the citation style I specify. I'm not completely sure it's Zoteros fault either for not including the volume title in the .bib file, but I can also not see, how Rmarkdown would be the cause.

    @bwiernik: How can I change the file to .json or .yaml? Does it work just to rename the file in the YAML header?
  • @moikenhinrichs if BBT is not producing volume titles, please open an issue on github.
  • We're doing triage here, but it looks like the bib file is generated by something in the RMarkdown pipeline, not by Zotero or BBT. Zotero/BBT exports the entry in question as @incollection, and doesn't export entries to have both year and date.
  • Yes, just change the file name to .YAML in the YAML header
  • My recollection is that RStudio may construct the .bib by reading straight from the Zotero database (which make it very fast) but does mean that some of the recent db updates may have introduced bugs. I'd suggest reporting to them, mentioning that the Zotero database has been updated a couple of times recently (6.0, 6.0.10 and possibly one more in between)
  • but exporting both date and year is weird in any case.
  • This may not be super helpful, but I use BBT with no problems -- have very many "incollection" items, and the .bib files I get are correct. This seems to suggest that the problem lies elsewhere (but I use latex afterwards, so no idea of the others).
  • Thank you @bwiernik and @emilianoeheyns, changing the .bib file to .json did the trick. No idea what is happening in my rstudio (or elsewhere). The .bib files just don't work.
  • I do want to note here that it was not Zotero or BBT generating these bib files.
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