Importing collection from Citavi to Zotero category / chapter numbering changes

Neloska
I exported a huge literature collection from Citavi to Zotero. In Citavi it's possible to create chapters in the form of categories. All these categories became folders and subfolders in Zotero, which is great.

But the order of the chapters has changed and Zotero gave them numbers which don't reflect the original order of chapters but the new one.

I don't see any system in the new order of chapters, it's not alphabetically.
Is there a way to stop Zotero from changing the order and adding new numbers to the chapters?
  • zuphilip
    The only possibility to have a fixed order among the collections in Zotero was to change the numbers in front when importing from Citavi. In the alphabetical order 1 is before 2 etc. and 1.1. is before 1.2. This order should therefore be the one you also have in Citavi. If you would delete all the numbers in front of the new collections then Zotero would order them alphabetically to your original category names.

    The behaviour cannot easily been changed as it is hard-coded in the translator (and I assume that for a lot of persons it also makes the right thing). However, you could probably try to adapt the collection names after importing e.g. using a little JS script in Zotero.
  • Neloska
    Hi, thanks for your feedback! But I am not sure it answers my problem.
    The categories in Citavi were already numbered, e.g.: "1 A 00 Physiologie" or "18 R 00 Normen".
    So Zotero should sort them by their numbers. But after being imported the numbers were changed into "5 A 00 Physiologie" and "2 R 00 Normen". Zotero also didn't sort them by the first letter, seeing that "A 00 Physiologie" was put after "R 00 Normen". So I really don't now by which system and why they were renumbered.
  • zuphilip
    Are you sure that the numbers in Citavi are part of the name of the categories? The import process should only add numbers prefixes but never change existing parts of the category name.

    According to my experience the order of the categories in Citavi is determined independent of the naming and this order will also be part of the ctv6 file you need to create for migrating the data. Therefore, the same order should be created in Zotero by adding the new number prefixes.

    Maybe you can also share a small example (i.e. a file ready to import in Zotero) with your categories.
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