Zotero 8/9, BBT, and citation keys

erydit
edited 15 days ago
[Split from Why are rapid releases major releases?]

I've lost track of what's going on with Zotero and its add-ons because of this version churn. Add-ons stop working and are abandoned. Others are impossible to figure out how they work now.

Take BBT, for example. I used to be able to pin a citation key, and it would appear in the "Additional" field. Then Zotero 8 arrived, claiming it now controls citation keys itself, and all my keys disappeared from the add-on.

Now I've updated to version 9, and the ability to pin citation keys has reappeared. The "Additional" field has returned, but it's empty everywhere.

Which behavior is a bug, and which isn't? I don't understand anything. I hope the developers themselves understand what they're doing.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited 15 days ago
    Any special functionality about citation keys is entirely BBT, and none of this has anything to do with Zotero 8 or 9 or "version churn". The only change we made — in 7.0.31 — was to introduce an official Citation Key field and add auto-migration of known fields from Extra into the official fields. Everything else is BBT, so you'd have to ask the BBT developer.
  • erydit
    As I understand it, up to and including Zotero version 7, BBT stored citation keys in the Extra field.

    After version 8, Zotero introduced its own native field for this purpose, and when upgrading from 7 to 8, there was a migration procedure—copying keys from the Extra field to Zotero's native field.

    But how does it all work now?

    Zotero still doesn't generate citation keys itself. So I still need the BBT plugin. And now, after installing it, I have three (3!) fields with citation keys in the program, which I can independently modify manually:
    https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u6265101/qur5xnkageequdkmzsx8.jpg

    1 - Дополнительно - An Extra field in Russian translation. It seems, that BBT still stores key there after pinnig. Why does it happens? And why it does not use native field?
    2 - Ключ цитирования - In russian it translates as "Citation Key". Is it a native field?
    3 - Citation key - Again, the 3 field for citation key. What is the point?
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    See above.
  • sdflewrit783
    I see filled Citation Key fields in v9 even though nobody in our group uses BBT. Not that I know of, and not according to the Added By records. What is happening please?

    If one user adds a reference to a group but another opens it and runs BBT, what will be in Added By and Modified By fields?
  • sdflewrit783
    It would be great to let the group admins see and control who has what installed and if they can use mass tools, like upcoming batch editing. Plus, to know who changed what (the Added By and Modified By are useful but...)
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    @sdflewrit783: Sorry, it looks like there was a recent regression that caused Modified By not to get updated properly for changes made in the app. (Edits from the web library would still have updated it.) That's fixed now, so edits by BBT will properly cause Modified By to get updated.

    But if Citation Key was getting populated, someone in the group was likely using BBT.
  • sdflewrit783
    Thanks for the explanation. Will this change come through in the next minor update to v9?
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    It’s fixed server-side.
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