We'll be offering some form of report generation in the very near future. However, we'd like to get a sense of the possible uses for this feature so that we can be sure our implementation suits people's needs.

The current plan is to generate reports as XHTML that can be customized with user-specified CSS files and then saved or printed. While there are more advanced solutions (XSLT, etc.), we think that XHTML/CSS would provide the right balance of flexibility and ease of use. There'll probably also be an RTF option for easy word processor input, and there could conceivably be a CSV option for spreadsheets if there was significant demand.

Please use this thread to describe the types of reports you'd like to create and how you see yourself using them.

@Dan,

First of all, I want to say thanks for all of your work on Zotero - I think this has the potential to be a great research tool.

Like Jay, I would like to see a CSV option. I'm a reference librarian, and I use spreadsheets for collection development. I could see using Zotero to add books to my order list, and the ability to export to a spreadsheet would save me a lot of time.

Would it be possible to designate the author's name be reversed (surname first) for a generated report?

I don't think we'd reverse them, but we can put <span> tags around them, which would let you accomplish the same thing. I've created a ticket for this.

Dan,

Two comments:

First comment:

Im a physician and in the last four years I worked on three systematic reviews. Briefly a systematic review is a research design that usually wishes to answer things like what is the best therapy strategies for tuberculosis. Than all reachable scientific information must be reviewed. A search strategy in several remote databases (such as PubMed, LILACS, SCOPUS, ISIWeb, EMBASE etc), journals and in full articles bibliography are applied. Later two or more reviewers apply inclusion or exclusion criteria (defined a priory) blinded to each other to classify all the summaries of the original articles (the double work is to minimize subjectivities) as of interest and not of interest for the review. In a second step the full text article is read and again classified in the same blinded fashion. The remainig have data extracted. In the first one I worked in we retreived more than 800 summaries and extracted data from 365 full articles.

We did this work at the time using EndNote which was very very handy due the amount of information.

Now I would like very much to migrate to zotero in all my activities, however the zotero export/import abilities concerns me. With the EndNote I was able to edit my own style in a way that I could export the library to a spreadsheet, not only with the bibliogrphy information but with the reviewers notes too. The interresting part is that in this way, the notes from each reviewer would go in different columns in the spreadsheet (an example of the columns in the spreadsheet) ...

uniquenumber; author; year; journal; volume; issue; initial page; title; reviwer1 step1; reviewer2 step1; reviewer1 step2; reviewer2 step2; wwwretrieved; printed ;libraryretrieved

It becomes a dataset...

With this I could import the spreadsheet to a statistical package such as R-project or STATA and later make tables to check which the journals more often have stuff of interest, make a time line to see if the amount of tuberculosis therapy investigations are increasing or decreasing over time, organize a full list of what articles were not retrieved from www and need to be retreived at the library or ordered in PubMed and most of all I could estimate the agreement of the classification between the reviewers in all steps.

I wrote all this just to say that I spent some time trying to figure out how to export the library to other software such as openoffice calc and so far I couldnt. Also, to give some idea of what kind of reports would be interesting zotero to have in my case!

Any suggestions in a workaround?

Second comment:

I am involved in teaching some softwares to MD classes and for the last three years I did teach the students how to use EndNote. Is there any teaching/learning material for zotero in Portuguese??? I would be interested in replacing the EndNote classes by a zotero tutorial. If it does not exist, perhaps I would invest some time to make a tutorial notebook for this class in the next semester!

Best regards.
Pedro Brasil

I'd love to see some way to export data to .CSV especially since this is one of the most recognized methods to transfer data from one program to another.

I am struggling with printing out a timeline using my zotero database. if I could export data to a CSV I could then easily add it to a specialized timeline application. I realize that there may be limits but any help would speed my work.

You can make a quick CSL file that sticks comas in between each of the pieces of data you want to include.