substitute Endnote within Word document by zotero

spanebia
Is zotero able to substitute Endnote references within a word document? I have a long document including many endnote references and a bibliography. But as I have to give back my endnote licence soon (I will leave University), I will have not the possibility to edit or add endnote references any more. It would be great if I could use zotero instead without changing every single reference. Is this possible?
  • bdarcus
    Not ATM. It should be possible to write a little script to do this, but I don't think anyone has.
  • dunkinjalki
    please do it bdarcus, then...

    perhaps lot of us need that.

    thanks
  • bdarcus
    So find someone else to do it. I neither have the time nor the skill to do it (I don't work with MS stuff).

    I also don't think you should expect Zotero developers (which I am not) to be responsible for it. This might be a good candidate for a separate utility.

    I do think there needs to be some improvements on the Zotero end to make citations more portable.
  • dunkinjalki
    u got annoyed!!

    sorry... and all the best
  • mark
    edited December 23, 2007
    Save some money and buy Endnote for your, you'll realize you've been kind to yourself.
    Better yet, save some money and pay someone to write a simple migration script for you, you'll be lucky with Zotero. Then release it open source, and you'll realize you've been kind to yourself and to many others.

    (I'm sorry dunkinjalki, I can't help you with that script either; just wanted to point out that you can do more with your money than putting it in Thomson Scientific's pockets).
  • woodpainter
    Do we have access to a list of active developers outside of Zotero itself?
  • dstillman
    Do we have access to a list of active developers outside of Zotero itself?
    You can always post on zotero-dev. Note that there's an existing ticket for this, so there's no need to post unless you have something to add to that or would like to sponsor third-party work on this.
  • RintzeRintze
    Just a thought, but could it be handy to create an Endnote style which includes the DOI in the Word fields? Users can easily swap Endnote styles. Then, you have a unique identifier you can use to match Endnote citations to the items in your Zotero library.

    How helpful this can be probably depends a lot on how many of the user's citations (both in Endnote and Zotero) contain DOI data.
  • bdarcus
    rintze: you're on the right track that robust global identifiers are important (even critical) to solving this problem of citation portability. But it's also true that DOIs only work for contemporary journal articles, and so miss a whole lot. It's for that reason I've been recommending using URIs as identifiers (legacy identifiers like ISBN, DOI, etc. can be represented as URIs). In short, exploit existing IDs and normalize them into good URIs.
  • kwsuling
    I was totally jazzed when I found Zotero two days ago; what a great, great tool. But, suddenly my plan to stop using Endnote and start using Zotero has come to a screeching halt. I have too many hundreds of pages of (Word) text strewn with thousands of Endnote citations (fields). I will need to re-use much of that material, particularly 600 pages or so that will be edited into a book. I really don't want to use two separate bibliographic systems...

    A conversion tool (not just for libraries, but for the Word documents) is CRITICAL to speeding Zotero adoption in my view.

    Could an external script extract the record numbers out of the Endnote lib and stash them into a special field (or like %%%%ENDNOTE REC NUM NNN%%%%% in an existing field) in the saved BibText version of the Endnote lib (maybe doing some heuristics to match, or assuming/requiring the Endnote lib was sorted by recnum before saving) before the BibText version is imported into Zotero? Wouldn't it then be a lot easier for a Zotero utility to go through the Word file converting each field based on info in its own lib db?

    Isn't there only one Endnote lib for each Word file? Doesn't that make is simpler?

    Am I confused, or is this actually a fairly simple problem?? Too bad I don't have the scripting skills...

    For what it's worth, I'm very, very tired of software that orphans data or unnecessarily adopts non-standard data formats. So, I hope Zotero uses formats that are as universal (and accessible) as possible.
  • Julia Thornton
    I'm not a software developer of any kind, but this thread gave me an idea which might get third party software developed. What do you think of this?

    The ideas that people have for applications which the current developers think are outside their domain could be put on a "Software Development Auction" tab on the Zotero site. Zotero users "bid" say $10 or however much they want to commit for the project, and when a developer sees that the total has reached $?? that makes it worth their while, (ie lots of people want it and are willing to contribute to collectively pay for it) then they can step in and claim the development right and the money on delivery.
    All those pages of wishful thinking could be aggregated to give developers a good idea of what people want in the particular app.
    Dud ideas will not get enough money committed, but since the idea is not developed committers lose no money.
    I can see a few holes in this suggestion, (Like who gets to "sign off" on the development as worth the money) but perhaps someone who is better at business plans could have a go at making the general principle workable?
    That way we get our wish list by pooling our resources.
  • mrken
    I notice there hasn't been any action on this for a while (ticket #686 hasn't been modified in 3 years). I just want to add my vote for a conversion script as I am willing to bet demand will increase. Here's why: As far as I can tell, Zotero is the ONLY bibliographic software out there now that has support for Word 2010 64-bit. (Baring trying to integrate BibTeX with Word). I myself just came to Zotero after my university nicely installed Office 2010 64-bit on my machine right before I went on leave for a year. I now have tons of documents with endnote's {Author, year #record} that need to be converted to Zotero's format. And I just can't bring myself to do it footnote by footnote. (I tried and got through about 15 of my 130 footnotes in one document before I figured I would be better off copying the document to another machine that still had older versions of Word on it.) I'll be happy to use Zotero going forward now that my library has been somewhat smoothly copied over, but I need to get those old papers formatted and out the door.
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