Upgrade Storageimporting a Citation (capital C) datafile
I have been using Citation (capital C - a name brand from citationonline.net) for a long time and especially like its ability to create linked notecards, but I'm very intrigued by Zotero's added attractions -- especially its web-friendliness and superior search capabilities, a big weakness of Citation. So I have been trying to import a large Citation datafile (or even a small sample of records from it), but am having trouble. (Searching the Zotero discussions for advice turns up lots of comments about lower-case citations but not upper-case Citation.)
I exported my datafile using Citation's RIS format and saved it as an ASCII .txt file (also tried ANSI), but the individual records get combined into a single record when I import it into Zotero, I lose foreign characters (even after saving the txt file with UTF-8 encoding), and several auxiliary fields (year, short/subsequent cite, all keywords, access phrase) get dumped into Zotero's date field. In short, a real mess.
Any ideas? I'd really like to give Zotero a try but can't face life without my current datafile.
I exported my datafile using Citation's RIS format and saved it as an ASCII .txt file (also tried ANSI), but the individual records get combined into a single record when I import it into Zotero, I lose foreign characters (even after saving the txt file with UTF-8 encoding), and several auxiliary fields (year, short/subsequent cite, all keywords, access phrase) get dumped into Zotero's date field. In short, a real mess.
Any ideas? I'd really like to give Zotero a try but can't face life without my current datafile.
Then copy/paste it here (checking that the output is the same as you see in a UTF-8 capable text editor).
But be aware that records in Citation's" Book- Extended Form" lose their Book title on importing and need to have the form changed to "Book" before exporting.
Journal formats seem OK but you may need to experiment a bit.
The good news: I made a little Citation data file, as suggested, of two records (one English, the other French), exported it as an Endnote file, converted it to UTF-8 encoding, and it worked, accents and all. Thanks! (Though too bad about the need to change book forms.)
In case you (or others) are interested, I also tried exporting the little Citation datafile directly (as a ANSI txt file, converted to UTF-8 encoding), and now Zotero wouldn't take it at all (neither as ANSI or as UTF-8). I got an "Alert" that say "No translator could be found for the given file." Fyi, here's what the file looks like in Notepad:
AU - Acollas
AU - Lemaire
CT - Banques nationales foncières par division départmental, conciliant les intérêts des propriétaires, des capitalistes, des départements de l'état
CY - Paris
PY - 1848
%2 Banques nationales foncières
%K FR; CO; BK; 19c;
%F Acollas & Lemaire 1848
TY - JOUR
AU - Adams, Edward F.
TI - The trust in politics
J0 - Overland Monthly
PY - 1899 August
VL - 34
IS - 200
SP - 120-22
%2 Trust in Politics
%K US; trusts; politics; regulation; 19c; concentration;
%F Adams 1899
I'd be interested to know if you see any problems with that. In any case, thanks again to both of you.
'TY' is a required field that isn't present for your first record.
All records must terminate with the 'ER -' tag. That they don't might be the reason it all got imported as one record.
%2, %K, and %F aren't valid fields & aren't deliminated with a dash
%2 looks like it might be the 'T2 -' tag
Is %K keywords? If so, that is the 'KW -' tag.
%F should be replaced with 'ID -', I think.