Upgrade StorageCan Zotero support my unusual workflow?
Hello,
I'm writing a book in a text editor not supported by Zotero (not Word/Libreoffice/Google docs). I have manually entered my citations into Zotero where each chapter's citations become a collection within the Zotero "My Library."
The trouble is that each citation I manually enter becomes its own unique reference. For example, I want to reference the book "Red Mother" in several pages, but each time I manually enter this item in Zotero, it becomes a separate item in the bibliography. Instead, I want it to appear once, and each note cited in the text references a different page in the same bibliographic entry.
How can I set this up manually in Zotero, that is, without using a supported text editor?
Specifically, I want to:
* Enter a book's bibliographic details one time in one place
* create a collection or other grouping for all of a chapter's citations which becomes that chapter's notes
* within that collection, enter citations which reference the main bibliographic entry with a page or chapter number
What is the best way to do this? Thank you for your help.
I'm writing a book in a text editor not supported by Zotero (not Word/Libreoffice/Google docs). I have manually entered my citations into Zotero where each chapter's citations become a collection within the Zotero "My Library."
The trouble is that each citation I manually enter becomes its own unique reference. For example, I want to reference the book "Red Mother" in several pages, but each time I manually enter this item in Zotero, it becomes a separate item in the bibliography. Instead, I want it to appear once, and each note cited in the text references a different page in the same bibliographic entry.
How can I set this up manually in Zotero, that is, without using a supported text editor?
Specifically, I want to:
* Enter a book's bibliographic details one time in one place
* create a collection or other grouping for all of a chapter's citations which becomes that chapter's notes
* within that collection, enter citations which reference the main bibliographic entry with a page or chapter number
What is the best way to do this? Thank you for your help.
Otherwise, I don't quite understand how you're generating the citations or how you want them to look. Could you provide an example?
I am using the Atom text editor. I'm deep into a very large book project and I like this text editor and associated tools much better than Word/Google Docs, so I want to focus on making this work.
Each citation in a chapter has the form [xxx-book name page number] or [xxx-report name url]. This helps me link the citation in my text with the item in Zotero as you can see in the screenshot.
I've been entering the book or report bibliographic information manually into Zotero for each chapter. In the case of webpages, I've used Zotero's browser plugins which have helped a lot.
Each chapter currently has its own collection in Zotero. The trouble is that when I want to reference the same book in two places, I've been creating a new entry for each one and just giving them different page numbers. But then when I create the bibliography, the same book is listed twice.
When I create my bibliography and notes currently, I get this:
Bibliography:
Linderman, F. (1932a). In Red Mother (p. 248). The John Day Company.
Linderman, F. (1932b). In Red Mother (p. 249). The John Day Company.
Linderman, F. (1932c). In Red Mother (p. 251). The John Day Company.
Citations:
(Linderman, 1932a)
(Linderman, 1932b)
(Linderman, 1932c)
What I want instead:
Linderman, F. (1932). Red Mother. The John Day Company.
(Linderman, 1932, p248)
(Linderman, 1932, p249)
(Linderman, 1932, p251)
The attached image shows how I'm currently saving the book. All these are in the same collection, but I would want other chapters/zotero collections to be able to reference the same underlying book.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u1288007/q9d2hv1vbmsmm8xt28r3.png
Maybe you could do what you want if you use the Better Bibtex plugin, and process your document through pandoc? https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/exporting/pandoc/index.html
You would probably need to modify all of your documents to take advantage of these tools, which can be a significant amount of work; how advanced is your project?
(or perhaps someone can suggest a less technical solution...)
One reason I prefer working with Atom and a pure text editor is that I can write my own software to automate a lot of the formatting, bibliographic tasks, and other things as well as use git to track changes. I think I can write a tool to automatically convert my system for tracking citations into one that will let me use Zotero in the way you describe. I wrote software to automatically convert my chapter text files with pandoc and upload them to google docs for collaborative editing, so I'm already using Pandoc to output docx files which Zotero could scan.
Another question - I understand Zotero is meant to work with the document plugins, but is there a way to give Zotero a path to a pure text file and have it scan that file for citations? Or does it only work with the plugins for Google docs/ MS Word/Libreoffice?
The link above states: "Zotero's RTF Scan feature allows users to create a fully cited document without having to use the word processor plugin".
RTF scan is both less reliable and would require converting the text (or markdown) file to an RTF file first, so while generally the right idea, I don't think that's the right choice here.
If you set your Quick Copy export format to BBT's citekey exporter, you'll be able to drag an item from Zotero into any text editor to insert a citation.