Upgrade StorageShared Documents - Where Does the Word Plugin Get its References?
Hi!
One of my grad students is using Zotero and we're working on a Word document together (PC). The Word document already has references. I'm running the Windows app while Word is open.
The student sent me an RDF file. I imported that as a new private group library.
However, the Word document seems to be using its own internal library. None of the changes I make to the new group library (capitalization, spelling, etc.) are reflected in the Word document.
Moreover, there are references showing up in the Word document that were not present in the library I received. Somehow, those references are updated, even when cutting/pasting.
Clearly there's disconnect between the app and the library I created (not to mention a disconnect in my understanding of how Zotero works).
I'm used to EndNote, where the active library window (or collection of open libraries) determines what "reference" pool Word uses when formatting the citations and bibliography.
How can I re-establish the connection with the new library I created? The library I received is a mess, with lots of problems in capitalization, abbreviation, and title formatting.
Thanks,
Nick
One of my grad students is using Zotero and we're working on a Word document together (PC). The Word document already has references. I'm running the Windows app while Word is open.
The student sent me an RDF file. I imported that as a new private group library.
However, the Word document seems to be using its own internal library. None of the changes I make to the new group library (capitalization, spelling, etc.) are reflected in the Word document.
Moreover, there are references showing up in the Word document that were not present in the library I received. Somehow, those references are updated, even when cutting/pasting.
Clearly there's disconnect between the app and the library I created (not to mention a disconnect in my understanding of how Zotero works).
I'm used to EndNote, where the active library window (or collection of open libraries) determines what "reference" pool Word uses when formatting the citations and bibliography.
How can I re-establish the connection with the new library I created? The library I received is a mess, with lots of problems in capitalization, abbreviation, and title formatting.
Thanks,
Nick
If you cite in a document and then send it to someone else without access to the library from which items were cited, Zotero falls back to metadata embedded in the document at the time of citation. There is no way the recipient can edit the metadata. The RDF export creates completely new items with no connection to the document on import, so that doesn't help.
The only way to fix the references is either for you to re-insert the items in the document or for your collaborator to fix them (unless they were cited from a group, in which case they can invite you to the group and you can fix them there).
On the other hand, this is really bad news. If everything is linked to a group, what if the student graduates or gets rid of their account? What if I start a new document from my personal library but want to add collaborators later on?
Cloud computing can be very convenient, but surely someone on the dev team must realize how problematic this is. For me, it's probably a deal breaker.
Nick
Just to clarify your example, @nfitzkee, think about it this way:
1) The student creates citations from their personal library.
2) They export the items to RDF, and then you import into your own library.
3) You make lots of corrections to those items in Zotero.
If those items you imported somehow automatically updated the citations in the document when you refreshed, then if the student refreshed the document with their own now-outdated versions of the items, the citations would change back, and that would happen every time one of you refreshed the document. It would be totally unusable. So there's no way this would work via export/import.
What we do hope to make possible is exactly what you describe — starting in a personal library and then being able to transfer items to a group library and relink the document to the items in the group library so everyone can edit them. We may also make it possible to transfer embedded items back to Zotero and relink to those, which would help in the case where you have a document created with Zotero but the person who created it is no longer around. But one way or another, items have to be linked to a given library so that there's an authoritative source for the metadata.
But for now, as adamsmith says, the best option when you didn't start in a group library is just to let the person who originally added the citations edit the metadata in Zotero as necessary.