Interface with word need serious work...

I love the concept of Zotero. However, the current implementation of citation insertion into Word (basically required at my office) leaves much to be desired. If I could have three improvements into the Word plugin it would be these:

1) Have a button to leave the citation window up at all times in a separate window that can be dragged and moved. This allows me to keep the citations open and insert as I go rather than having to 'click button', find reference in the same collection I found the last one, 'insert reference'. That extra 'finding' time is a waste.

2) Allow ctrl+click selection of multiple references for insert rather than using the clunky 'multiple reference' button.

3) Have Zotero automatically detect when I insert a reference next to a previous reference and automatically make it a 'multiple reference'.

Are these possible?
  • edited October 9, 2008
    @dh: I presume on 1 that you're using a Mac? Search for the forums for your answer (in short, not Zotero's fault, and nothing they can do about it).

    I agree with your other points; I don't see any reason why they couldn't be supported, but I don't speak for Zotero.
  • All of your points should be possible, and I agree that they would be nice features making the Word integration more mature.
  • Using Windows...
  • I agree with all of dh's points. I also find it frustrating that when I go to insert a new citation the window always starts at "My Library" rather than the most recently used file folder.
  • I agree, these points would be really great for the word integration (with drag&drop from the opened window)!

    I would add one more thing: Ability to manually reorder the items for the in text citation when using multiple references. I know that some people prefer alphabetical order. But there are a lot of people who want to decide the order of the in text citations for example based on importance.
  • Hi, Also love Zotero, and agree with the drag and drop need

    Also, I have a big problem to use it for serius work, when working on word, if you quote the same article twice, in different parts of the text, Zotero introduces a second reference number and on the refrence list at the end of the document it adds twice the details of such reference.

    This is not the rigth way to make refrences, for EACH citation we should only have ONE number (even if we used serval times on the text) and details of the respective reference should only be listed ONCE on the reference list at the end of the document, so the all reference tool for longer documents became useless. Or... there are any way to go around this problem?

    Thanks for your help.
  • fcf - that's style dependent - which style are you working with? Most scientific styles (e.g. Nature, IEEE) do this right already.
    Of the other styles I can only think of footnoted styles that show the behavior as described by you.
    Or maybe you're not actually inserting the same reference, but have a duplicate in your library. (i.e. if you has Smith 2007 "terribly important paper" twice, Zotero will treat it as two different papers.

    (I'd recommend not using all caps in forum posts - this is generally considered "yelling" and I for once always start out a little annoyed when I encounter it it a post.)
  • A pinnable citation window would be neat.

    My particular request though would be to be able to ctrl-select multiple items to add/remove from citations and also to add/remove from the bibliography.

    A few journals, some monograph publishers, and many university programmes (especially in the humanities) require that the bibliography include all material read by the author and not just all cited material. Multiple-select would be very helpful with that, as would be the ability to right-click on a folder and 'Add entire collection' or 'Add entire library' etc. into the bibliography. There's an obvious workaround (generating the bibliography from within Zotero, and not the plugin), but it would be great to be able to omit that extra step.
  • thanks Adam,

    i was using the Chicago manual of style, with nature i ve that problem solve indeed. Also thanks for the advice on caps. the aim was not yielling, only highlight, sorry for that.

    fred
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