Importing from Mendeley Groups

edwardschwartz
I'm trying to transition from Mendeley to Zotero. Most of my references are in Mendeley groups. I've seen the advice to copy papers from groups into my personal collection before syncing, but that doesn't preserve the folder structure, and since I have a lot of folders, is probably a non-starter. Are there any other solutions?

Aside: When using a IT-mandated MITM service (Zscaler), the online Mendeley import functionality fails, but reports an authentication failure instead of a certificate failure. This was very confusing until I figured out that Zotero was using certificate pinning.
  • dstillman
    Mendeley doesn't let you copy collections between libraries and preserve the collection structure?
    When using a IT-mandated MITM service (Zscaler), the online Mendeley import functionality fails, but reports an authentication failure instead of a certificate failure. This was very confusing until I figured out that Zotero was using certificate pinning.
    We don't use certificate pinning — that's a different thing. This just sounds like a custom CA enabling the MITM. If you're on Windows, Zotero 6 should use the system root certificate store automatically, but if you're on macOS or Linux you'd want to use the Zotero 7 beta.

    Can you provide a Debug ID for the authentication failure, though? We can try to show a clearer error message.
  • edwardschwartz
    > Mendeley doesn't let you copy collections between libraries and preserve the collection structure?

    It doesn't seem like it. You can copy the papers, but the folders don't move over.

    RE: certificate pinning, I am on macOS. I switched to Zotero 7 beta and it fixed the problem. I'll try to get a Debug ID; I think all that is needed is a better error message.
  • edwardschwartz
    D1624964921
  • dstillman
    Thanks — we'll look into the error message.

    I'm afraid we're probably not going to be support importing from Mendeley groups — there just hasn't been enough demand for this in the years since we added the importer for us to justify spending time on it. (I think the last request was in 2022.) So if there's no way to copy collections between libraries in Mendeley (which does appear to be the case, in both Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Reference Manager), I'm afraid you'd need to recreate the collection structure in your personal library and then import from there.
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