Conference Names Have All Disappeared

peterm
I recently noticed that when I cite conference papers, the conference name does not appear. Looking into my Library, I no longer see the conference names for any paper. They used to be in the Library, and they used to print just fine. It seems the conference names have disappeared.

This is a big problem. I stopped using Endnotes a long time ago in favor of Zotero. That means that I probably have easily 100+ new references in Zotero that are not in the only copy of my thousands of bibliography entries that correctly gives conference names. I have no idea how I can fix this, except one entry at a time, and I'm concerned that other fields will disappear in Zotero in the future.

I'm currently using Zotero 2.0.2 on Firefox 3.5.9 in Ubuntu Karmic. I am using the online synchronization service My best guess is that my conference names were erased when I transitioned between versions of Zotero.
  • dstillman
    It seems the conference names have disappeared.
    That's highly unlikely, unless you (against recommended practices) exported and re-imported your library, in which case it's likely.
  • peterm
    I think I'm beginning to see how this might have happened. I was able to find a copy of the zotero .rtf of my main academic library I kept from a year ago (I suspect this is a backup I made before I switched to the beta version that allowed online synchronization). In it, I see the title and conference of my paper looking like this:

    <dc:title>Attitude Change in Face-To-Face and Online Political Deliberation: Conformity, Information, or Perspective Taking?</dc:title>
    <dc:title>American Political Science Association Annual Meeting</dc:title>

    In an rtf I kicked out of my current library, I see only one title, the top one, and no conference name. I'm guessing that in the earlier version of Zotero, conference names where included as titles and then a later version eliminated dual titles, erasing the conference name?

    It concerns me that as Zotero gets updated, I could lose bibliographic information. Also, does anyone have any idea how I might get the conference titles back in place other than one at a time? I'm a moderately capable linux user.
  • peterm
    Dan: Just saw your post. That may well be what happened. When i switched to the Zotero 2 beta, I may have used an export to .rtf and reimport to put pieces of my library from different computers together. A little odd, though, that it would take me a year to discover this if that's what happened.

    Anyhow, on the assumption that this is what happened, is there any way for me to fix this en mass that you can think of? Could I, for example, change the xml markers for conference names on my old .rtf backup (e.g., w/ regex), reimport into Zotero, and somehow get it to remove duplicate paper titles in favor of ones with conference names? I'm also familiar w/ sql, if that helps.
  • dstillman
    You mean RDF, not RTF. And an RDF isn't a backup.
    It concerns me that as Zotero gets updated, I could lose bibliographic information.
    That's not the case at all. As I said above, if this happened to you, you likely exported and reimported your library via RDF, which you should almost never need to do and has never been the recommended way to transfer your library or back up your library. You didn't respond, but I assume that's what you did. As I noted on the other thread, this is a bug in the RDF translator that should be fixed, but you didn't lose data just by upgrading Zotero.

    And no, there's not a good way to get the data back at this point unless you have a proper backup of your library. Depending on when you did this, you might find the data in an old automatic pre-upgrade backup of your database in your Zotero data directory, in which case there would be some fairly advanced ways of getting the data back via SQL (though it might be easier to just generate the list via SQL or from the RDF and enter them manually).
  • dstillman
    When i switched to the Zotero 2 beta, I may have used an export to .rtf and reimport to put pieces of my library from different computers together.
    OK, that was probably it, then. (Not that it helps you now, but syncing would have been another way to do this.)
    I'm also familiar w/ sql, if that helps.
    Check for pre-upgrade backups, then—they'd likely have "36.bak" in their filenames. You could theoretically use SQLite's ATTACH and then get the titles over, with some difficulty.
  • peterm
    Thanks Dan for your help and the reassurance that simply upgrading Zotero won't cause data loss! I'm also glad to hear that .rdf will no longer lose conference names. If I kept up w/ the bboards and zotero website perhaps I would have known this was a problem, but most casual users won't do either. Would probably be best in the future to disable features that can cause data loss until they are fixed or put a big warning dialog into the software explaining what might happen.

    As for my fixes, another way to approach this would be to write a perl program--would take maybe a few hours to write and debug. But, I've done a quick count and it looks like I have maybe 100 conference papers. This being so, it'll take the least time for me to run through my backup from last year and insert conference names by hand in the new Zotero.

    Cheers!
  • ajlyon
    Would probably be best in the future to disable features that can cause data loss until they are fixed or put a big warning dialog into the software explaining what might happen.
    Note that the RDF export is not designed for backup or transport to other copies of Zotero. It and all the export formats is lossy, since there are architectural differences between Zotero's data model and the data model of each export format. Of course, conference names should have been handled correctly, and developers are working to minimize to data loss associated with various export options, but (1) this data loss is associated with a feature that always has data loss; and (2) there couldn't have been a warning about the conference names bug before yesterday, since it was not a known bug.
Sign In or Register to comment.