Zotero Citation Key Generation

nbrt
As I understand it, Zotero 8 introduced a new field "Citation Key". I have used BBT which has (had?) the "Citation key" field. The field from BBT no longer appears in my Info pane for an item. I guess the Citation Keys have just been copied from the Citation keys. I mostly used BBT for generating these citation keys (at least that's what I think). (And maybe exporting as well, but I guess if a citation key exists Zotoro itself could do the export just as well.) So, now I am trying to understand the new changes and wondered whether I actually still need the plugin as less plugins to depend on should probably be better? So how does Zotero itself generate these Citation Keys? In the settings, I haven't seen anything about a citation formula like for BBT.

Thanks a lot and thanks everyone for the great work on Zotero!
  • adamsmith
    Zotero doesn't generate Citation Keys in that field at all. You definitely still want BBT
  • nbrt
    Oh okay. Thanks!
  • michaelbbarr
    Hi there,
    I'm a fellow user of the Citation Key generated by BBT. My workflow is: enter a new source in Zotero, right-click and select Better BibTeX, then select Regenerate BibTeX key. Then I go to my writing tool, Roam Research, and activate the ZoteroRoam extension. It connects to Zotero. I open the dashboard and see the source and its citekey, which, until a few days ago, looked like @nameTitleSomething. Now the key looks something like @AYGKDHSL. It would seem logical that the Zotero Connector is looking in the wrong spot for the BBT-generated citation key and is either generating its own code and/or using something from Zotero.

    The essence of the problem is I have TONS of sources in Roam Research that I am citing in my writing, and down the road the translation and auto reference section completion features I plan to use in Zetlr won't work, which I means I possibly have a ton of orphaned data. I'm not going to panic as I'm not the only person in this boat. I've logged a help/question ticket in the Zotero Connector Git as I suspect that's where this will get fixed for me.

    I don't think my issue lies with Zotero or BBT.

    I added my thoughts here, hoping others will find them useful as they work through this issue.

    Hope that helps.
Sign In or Register to comment.