Create action to copy citation for google docs?

davemurrayrust
I'm working with the Google docs plugin, and it's really slow (I thoroughly appreciate the effort, and it's a shame that Google still has a bug that means you can't deploy the fast version!)

If I understand right, the citation that ends up in the google doc is just a link, with text and a URL. If so, would it be possible to create a quick action in Zotero to copy the currently selected item(s) as the right form of URL for a google doc?

My current use case is adding the 100+ citations my co-author has left as comments. For each one, I have to i) see it in the google doc; ii) look it up online; iii) add it to zotero; iv) go back to the google doc and start the citation chooser; v) wait; vi) find the right Item and cite it. Mostly I then do vii) realise I've forgotten to click "omit author" and go through the loop again. It takes around 2 mins per citation - if I could copy them straight from Zotero and paste in, it would be about 20s.

If I write something to construct the right kind of link, should it work? The URL seems to be "https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?sIu4L7" - is the ID at the end likely to be the item ID?
  • adamsmith
    I don't think this is possible, no, the citations actually need to register with Zotero -- note that even within google docs, cutting and pasting citations will break them if the person doing so doesn't have the connector installed.

    Any reason you can't do the final step in Word or LibreOffice?
  • davemurrayrust
    A general hatred of Word (for having broken so very many times...) and a need to have the document as collaborative. In general I tend to work with Overleaf, which makes it all much easier, but Docs is much nicer for getting ideas together.

    If the word plugin is much snappier, that might end up being a reason to use it, though.
  • adamsmith
    Both Word for Windows and LibreOffice (on any platform) are indeed much faster than the GDocs integration. Word for Mac not so much. (I agree on GDocs as a platform for initial, collaborative drafting, but I do tend to move documents out of there both for more detailed editing -- track changes sucks -- and if they have more than ~50 citations for the reason you're seeing.)

    If you already have Zotero citations in there, make sure to follow https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/moving_documents_between_word_processors for transferring the document.
  • dstillman
    edited today at 12:57am
    it's a shame that Google still has a bug that means you can't deploy the fast version!
    For what it's worth, while we haven't seen any visible progress from Google on this, we've just rolled out a new version of the Zotero Connector that will attempt to use the newer, faster version of the Google Docs plugin and then silently fall back to the old version if it hits the error. (There's not currently any way to know which version you're using other than watching the debug output.)

    We're hoping that this will both let most people have the faster experience and log more errors on Google's end to try to prod them to fix the problem, since all our other attempts to get them to fix it have been unsuccessful.

    All of which is to say, you can try your document and see if it feels any snappier…
Sign In or Register to comment.