retain bibtex key

frogger3d
I noticed that the bibtex key is not imported. When the database is exported to bibtex keys are generated from the title and the year. This does not match with tex documents I have written before and is rather annoying.

It would be nice if the bibtex key were stored and used while exporting.
  • Robert Samal
    Would be useful for me, too.
    (Even a subset of this would be nice: ability to customize how the "key" is created.)

    Thanks for considering this.
  • SiGi
    This feature request is similar to my discussion "missing fields" http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1048/missing-fields/#Item_8.

    It would be useful to have fields like "personal signature". Here could be the right place to store the bibtex-key from imported bib-files.
  • griznold
    edited October 21, 2008
    Would be useful for me, too.

    The topic of the other discussion is more about some other missing field. I wouldn't mix them together.
    And I wouldn't like to introduce a workaround for a really important feature - in longterm view the bibtex-key is neccessary for the seamless integration.

    Thanks a lot!

    Edit: It is also discussed in http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/4331/bibtex-importexport-problems/
  • st
    edited September 22, 2009
    I also searched for the Bibtex Key field. This would be a very very useful feature! Are there any news? Will this be implemented some day?

    In the moment the only way i found is to export the bib, open it in a text editor, search for the entry (sometimes over 100 entries for me), copy it, paste it into latex. Zotero wants to be fast. But this is very, very slow :-/

    Thanks
    Stolzi
  • bdarcus
    I think Zotero needs something like a "user data" tab, and to have a "label" field there. This could store the bibtex key. Would also help to move other similar fields over there.
  • RintzeRintze
    edited September 23, 2009
    Would also help to move other similar fields over there.
    Which fields would that be exactly? "Added Date", "Modified" and perhaps "Repository"?
    I think Zotero needs something like a "user data" tab, and to have a "label" field there.
    I think separating these fields might be useful, but listing these fields at the end in the metadata tab along with a simple delimiter (e.g. a grey line) to mark the different field categories (item-metadata & user/item-metadata) would probably suffice, no?
  • st
    Are there any news to the bibtex key field? This is a very cirrcumstantial thing for latex users and i think that a lot of zotero users use latex...
  • souleymen
    is there newers to show the biptex key on zotero
  • noksagt
    No. It requires changes to the zotero database, which come slowly. The need for a local ID field is known and acknowledged:
    https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/763
  • ashwin.rao
    The post says "I think the ultimate solution to this problem ought to be resolved with a view towards Zotero 2.0. Put simply, do these keys figure in URIs, and if they do, how? What is their formal role in the data model? ""

    The current version is 2.09 and frankly this is the only feature that is stopping me from using Zotero.
  • bdarcus
    Responding to Rintze a year+ after the fact, since I still believe my suggestion here is a good idea (and suggests how to get this particular field added).
    Which fields would that be exactly? "Added Date", "Modified" and perhaps "Repository"?
    Not sure about the last one; why do you suggest that?

    Notes and tags are also user data though.
    I think separating these fields might be useful, but listing these fields at the end in the metadata tab along with a simple delimiter (e.g. a grey line) to mark the different field categories (item-metadata & user/item-metadata) would probably suffice, no?
    Either one: so long as the distinction is crystal clear from bottom (data layer) to top (the UI the user sees).
  • RintzeRintze
    I think the repository from which an item is saved is, in most cases, not really part of the canonical resource metadata and something worth sharing with other users (especially in the sciences, resource metadata can often be retrieved from a large number of sources, e.g. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=8656040700891658398&hl=en&as_sdt=4000000 ).
  • bdarcus
    Fair enough, but isn't that a separate issue from what is really specific to a user?

    I guess to put this differently, the "repository" field itself is a bit odd. Really what you want to say is user-specific is the zero-or-more copies of the item content available to the user. Each of those copies comes from someplace, which is what the "repository" idea gets at.
  • RintzeRintze
    What I think separates item-metadata from user/item-metadata is that item-metadata should (generally) be the same among all users that have stored that particular resource. As the repository is in most cases only a breadcrumb that indicates where the user got the item metadata, I would classify it as user-data.
  • mreiter
    edited February 8, 2011
    I think better than having a field to manually enter a BibTeX-Key for every title would be a option to define how the BibTeX-keys are created.

    Someone describes how to do this here: http://www.curiousjason.com/zoterotobibtex.html

    The mask for BibTeX-key-creation is stored in a JavaScript-variable in the user profile. This may very likely get overwritten in an update of Zotero, so the described solution is really just a workaround.

    But if it is just the matter of setting a variable, it should be pretty easy to implement the possibility to enter the value of this variable in the Zotero preferences, which would make the change update persistent.
  • devash
    I also wish for a solution for bibtex key use, and I want best of both worlds: automatic key generation and manual key management.

    Ideally a solution for me would look like this:

    *) An additional field for the bibtex key which is editable by the user. It is irrelevant for me where exactly it's located as long as it's there.
    *) If I import data without bibtex keys, allow me to have keys autogenerated.
    *) If I export data without bibtex keys, allow me to have keys autogenerated.
    *) In addition provide an option to autogenerate bibtex keys for selected items (with the option of overwriting existing keys or not). This would cover already existing collections.

    The generation of keys can be customized just like now via the existing javascript code. Keys for which generation did not work well (e.g. currently "Börger" will be coded as "baerger" in a generated key, though it should be "boerger") can always be corrected manually.

    So a user could maintain his bibtex keys with minimal effort.

    This would make the Zotero - LaTeX workflow so much easier.

    But, considering that this issue has been open since 2007, I don't have much hope that a solution is going to be implemented in the near future.
  • uvesco
    completely agree with devash!
    it would be a great implementation for mindmap and latex users.
  • der_vegi
    Yes, too bad, that a custom field for the Bibtex-key is not there yet. I really like Zotero, but I will probably go back to Jabref for now... :(
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