Retaining lists of articles cited by a reference imported into my library

mark.diamond
I exported from Scopus the bibliographic information of a number of articles in which I am interested. The exported bibliographic information includes a list of references cited by each of the top-level articles. I have successfully imported the top-level articles into my Zotero database but the field (listed in BibTex form as "references={...") appears not to have been imported in association with the top-level articles.

Is there any way to retain the "references={..." field in association with my imported articles? I could then use the summary list(s) of articles to do yet further searches and import the full details of cited articles.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate any similar question or relevant answer, perhaps because I don't quite know what to search for?!
  • adamsmith
    There's not reasonably easy way to import the references along with items from Scopus.
    The easiest is probably if you get the DOIs for the references (which will requires some clever search & replace or light scripting) and import those in bulk using add by identifier.
  • mark.diamond
    Thank you adamsmith. Unfortunately, your answer suggests to me that I didn't phrase my question properly. I am not trying to get Zotero to do some sort of recursive import where it parses and downloads the additional references. All I am hoping to achieve is to include the "references={..." field in the bibliographic record for the original item.

    For example, if I download a citation for "Smith, A. (1999). This article. This Journal" and the record that I have downloaded for Smith includes a field reading "references={Jones, 2022; Always, 1989; ...}" then I would like to save that reference list with however much or little information as was included in the download into a field of the "Smith" record ... just as Zotero will include the year of publication of Smith (1999) in a field.
  • adamsmith
    In which field? "references" is a BiBTeX field that Scopus made up, so it'd require customizing import and there's no obvious place to put this, but at a purely technical level this is pretty simple
  • tim820
    I expect that the ability to deal with the reference list data increasingly available from metadata services will come at some point. It's just not clear exactly how.

    While also not exactly what @mark.diamond wants, the Cita add-on (still under development) can import a RIS file with a *single* article's references that can be exported from Scopus. For storage of the data, Cita first puts the references list extracted from the RIS file into an auto-created Note under the Zotero item, in a text-code format that the add-on can read. It also adds a new tab - Citations - that then contains all the references formatted for the user. It can show which references are already in your Library, and add Related links to them. As Cita is still under development, it's not yet a completely smooth or fully-functional process.

    Cita has some extra options in its drop-down menu under the Citations tab to import from pasted text, but I am not sure if it would work directly with a cut and paste from the type of Scopus export @mark.diamond mentions.

    Developments in this area do seem to be accelerating. New services providing citation/reference metadata are arising regularly at the moment, many free to use. While Scopus is a paid service, you can access similar citation export (to RIS) functionality at the free CitationChaser web site (which gets its citation data from Lens, which apparently contains data from ~250 million papers).
    https://estech.shinyapps.io/citationchaser/
    Haddaway, N. R., Grainger, M. J., & Gray, C. T. (2022). Citationchaser: A tool for transparent and efficient forward and backward citation chasing in systematic searching. Research Synthesis Methods, 13(4), 533–545. https://doi.org/10.1002/jrsm.1563. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jrsm.1563 (open access)
    https://zenodo.org/record/4543513
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