Scannable Cite as Citation Style

philemonreinhardt
So I tried to find a solution on my own but I didn't. Maybe someone can help me? (@adamsmith ?)

I'm using Obsidian for all my writing and Zotero for Literature-Management. Because of that I stumbeled over the ODF/DocX Scan-Tool which works just fine when I'm inserting my citations with the Cmd+Shift+C-Command - but for that I always have to tab into Zotero, find the literature, copy it, tab back into Obsidian (or any other Markdown, Latex or whatever processor thing - don't know the official terminology).

Luckily for Obsidian there are quite a few Zotero integrations which work similar to the Word Add-In so that inserting a citation is much easier. The problem is that I cannot choose the Scannable Cite Format which I'm using. Oftentimes Pandoc is supported or other installed citation styles - but as Scannable Cite is no citation style I cannot choose it.

Has someone an idea / a solution for me? I want to work with Scannable Cite so that I only have to choose the citation style at the very end of my work. And I don't want to work with Word because it sucks :D
Sorry if there were already similar topics - I just couldn't find them.

If there are any questions on my setup, just ask.

Thanks a lot for your help
Philemon
  • philemonreinhardt
    I have to add a comment - I tried to build my own Scannable Cite template with the (outdated?) "Zotero Integration" Obisidian Plugin. As I couldn't mimic the second pipe (field?) Author, Year format I thought I just use the cite key because I thought this pipe is only for my readability. But when I wanted to convert it with the ODF-Scan I got an error. When I changed the Scannable Citations manually into the classic Author, Year format, it worked again. Is there any reason for that? I thought the last pipe is the important one..?
  • adamsmith
    You can't generate the scannable cite format with CSL because you don't have access to the internal ids used in the last part (zu:...).

    I did, however, add support for scanning pandoc markdown style citations ([@citekey]) recently, and that's of course easy to produce with a citation style. See the documentation for details. I would guess that's the reason the tool ran into trouble when you used the core key (esp if you included @) in scannable cite -- you were mixing the two and the parsing failed.
  • philemonreinhardt
    Thanks for your answer (and the technical explanation)! Actually it was the citekey without the @ --> i. e. { | bauerGriechischdeutschesWorterbuchSchriften1988 | s. v. | zu:111111:BBBBBBB} - but maybe it cannot convert it because of the option to suppress the author with a "-" before it? So is this field not only for readability but expects an author and a year divided by a comma?

    But in any way you would just suggest using pandoc citations? I chose to use the Scannable Cite because it seemed to me more robust (because the itemkey is constant whereas the citekey could be changed manually - right?)

    If the suggestion still ist pandoc - is there any quick way to convert scannable cite into pandoc? Or will I need to convert the Scannable Cite into Zotero Citations and then back into Pandoc?
  • philemonreinhardt
    Rereading my comment I just realized that I was missing one pipe. I tried it again with { | bauerGriechischdeutschesWorterbuchSchriften1988 | s. v. | |zu:111111:BBBBBBB} but I still got
    https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u10473448/4j53lag88382qdbykyfb.png
  • adamsmith
    I'll test if I can reproduce that -- docx conversion runs on different parsing code that has seen less use (and thus less testing), so there may be unexpected bugs. What you have certainly should work.

    Scannable Cite is definitely a little more robust, but if you're using the Better BibTex plugin, it'll help you keep the citekey stable (and I thought Obsidian integration relied on it anyway, but that's nothing I know much about), which makes the pandoc citation format quite reliable. There's no easy way to convert the two, no, going the detour through Zotero citations would be the way to go.
  • philemonreinhardt
    edited today at 6:16pm
    Thanks again for your answer. Yes I have Better BibTex installed but before migrating to Obsidian I used Scrivener and from there I have already about 300 references in the Scannable Cite format. That's why I tried to find an automatic workflow for it. And with an own template option in the Zotero Integration using Nunjuncks I was able to produce the imitation of the Scannable Cite I showed above (maybe a little bit scetchy but it worked).
    Funnily enough the Pandoc-Citation the integration produces looks like [@AuthorYear, {pp. 23-25}] - and because of the curly brackets the ODF-Scan cannot read it.
  • adamsmith
    Just to be sure -- that's not an actual copy of the scannable cite, is it? Because you can't just make up an item id. That will scan, but the result is completely useless because it doesn't connect to actual Zotero items.
    The most recent version of ODF Scan should take curly brackets in pandoc citations
  • philemonreinhardt
    No that‘s not the actual copy. As I understand the scannable cite, it consists of a library-id as well as an item-id. So because the first part stays the same, I just needed to get the item-id and this I got right (I could compare it with the classic copy-paste method).
    Good to know. Maybe I also try my scannable cite mimic with an odf-scan tomorrow
  • philemonreinhardt
    So I just made a very quick check with LibreOffice and the ODF-Scan. It seems to work with the "random" text after the first pipe. That's great!

    I can check the pandoc citation with curly brackets tomorrow.

    The only thing I ran into - but I don't know if there is a solution for that - I moved to another library within Zotero (my old Scannable Cites start with zg: and have different ids and so on), and if I have a document were the scannable cites are mixed, I think it just uses the first one it gets and leaves the rest unconverted. Is this possible?
  • adamsmith
    Oh it certainly shouldn't, but I can check. All libraries are on the current machine?
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