An alternative to the stock BibTeX export

I have put together two edited versions of the official BibTeX translator which might be of use to some.

In addition to a few improvements to the auto-generated BibTeX keys (follow link below for detail), the main 'feature' of these exporters is that they (smartly) lighten the resulting .bib file by omitting several fields from Zotero's standard BibTeX export.

"BibTeX-LowFat" omits a few fields that some over-eager BibTeX styles include in citations if you have them (URL, ISBN, ISSN, etc). URL's are, of course, left in for web pages and anything without a page range (see link for the whole set of criteria).

"BibTeX-NonFat" omits everything except fields commonly used for citing (and maybe even some of those! It's aggressive). This produces a minimal BibTeX export with no keywords, abstract, notes, etc.)

At the following link you'll find full explanation, instructions, justification and ideas for alternatives. Hope this helps someone. Comments welcome.

http://github.com/commonman/zotero-bibtex-sb
  • scot,
    This is brilliant! I came across your post after having decided I needed to do something like this (only far more of a hack) — I use LyZ for LyX integration, which exports via BibTeX. The problem is the resultant .bib file gets full of all sorts of bloat such as keywords, and especially the annote field, which sometimes is enormous (cuz I keep full rich text summaries in Zotero). This seems a perfect solution, once I can get it used by LyZ.

    Only concerns for me are a few fields I do not want omitted, such as DOI in particular. But I dare say I can fiddle around with the .js to sort that out... :)

    (My other annoyance is the need to use double braces in, say, booktitle so as to preserve capitalisation. Everything is initial capital with forced all lower case following in my bibliography otherwise. Note, using McBride implementation of Chicago 15 citation format via Natbib.)
  • Ah, nice! I'm using http://github.com/unhammer/zotero-natbib at the moment in order to get the "lastchecked" field into natbib, but will most likely be stealing some of your contributions ;-)
  • jwood,

    Glad you can use it. You can get the DOI back by removing the comment marker ('//') from line 120 of 'BibTeX-LowFat.js', which just now looks like this:

    // doi:"DOI",

    I suspect the caps problem is an issue with your style. I use this implementation of Chicago notes:

    http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/exptl/biblatex-contrib/biblatex-chicago/

    and it just uses the capitalization I give it, no brackets required. The styles is very well done, well documented, though it inherits the complexity of the Chicago notes specification, and it requires biblatex.

    unhammer,

    use away. The Ø modification does seem necessary. I have some proposals in for the the standard BibTeX export, and I'll add this one when I chase them up again.

    Scot
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