parse authors list during manual item entry

maffew · April 19, 2007

Hi,

It's fantastic how Zotero can screenscrape article metadata from so many sites.

But sometimes I still need to enter in details by hand.

The part I find the fiddliest is entering the authors.

It'd be great if I could just paste the list of authors in Zotero, and have it parse out the names.

It seems like a straightforward parsing problem. I guess the user could click a button to rotate through various options until the parsing looks right. E.g. options:

first last, first last, ...

last, initials, last, initials, ...

Thanks for listening.

Cheers,
m.

colemanhunter@gmail. · December 19, 2007

Any follow-up on this issue? I am having to manually input a lot of names for articles that are not recognized by Zotero, which is a very time-consuming (and easy to make mistakes). It would be nice to just copy and paste the list of authors from the article into one line, and have the program recognize different names as the last post mentioned. The separate boxes for last, first names are very cumbersome.

Thanks for any help!! I'm new to this program and trying to break free from EndNote...but this author-thing makes it tough!

bdarcus · December 19, 2007

Ideally, anything like this needs to be able to support a) organization names (ABC, Inc.), b) non-Western personal names where sort order is reversed (family given), and c) multiple family and given names

sybille · December 19, 2007

The separate boxes for last, first names are very cumbersome.

It is possible to change the two boxes into one box which will accept a name as "First Last." Just click on the button at the end of the Author field, before the - and +, to switch between one field and two fields (or boxes). The order will reverse correctly if you change from one to two.

This is not the same as automatic parsing, but I find it does speed things up for those times when I need to enter an Author manually with copy and paste.