Upgrade StorageMultilingual Zotero for references in Chinese
I am excited to know how to use Multilingual Zotero for my Chinese
references. I already watched the video tutorial on youtube. But I
found it did not work well for my Chinese references. Look forward to
any help. Thanks.
references. I already watched the video tutorial on youtube. But I
found it did not work well for my Chinese references. Look forward to
any help. Thanks.
If there are libraries or aggregator websites in China that provide that data, we would be very glad to work with you to build translators that can extract and store that information.
Automated translation and transliteration would be suitable tasks for a Firefox plugin that supplements Zotero. User ajlyon (Avram Lyon) of these forums has plans for automated transliteration of European languages; if that moves toward implementation, we will want to make the framework robust enough to handle extension to Chinese and Japanese.
My little experiment in automated transliteration is here: http://github.com/ajlyon/translit
It currently works with Cyrillic and some historical Latin scripts and runs independently of Zotero, but it could be integrated into Zotero or a Zotero plugin relatively easily, and it could be extended to Japanese's Hiragana. I'm afraid it simply won't do for Chinese (or Japanese Kana), since it's a simple character replacement, and it can't do transcription. Perhaps there are libraries out there for automatic romanization of Chinese and we can build off of them.
In the meantime, the multilingual version of Zotero is still very useful-- it will let you enter and maintain all three required versions of author names, titles, and the like: Chinese, romanized Chinese, and English. Otherwise you have to translate the data in Zotero and either discard the original Chinese data or put it inconvenient places, like the abstract or extra fields. If you maintain all the formats in Multilingual Zotero, you can easily switch to writing an article in Chinese from the same sources without reentering all the metadata.
Another inconvenience is that I can not sort library items by scholarly cited time. It is not handy to sort out the very important academic articles in a topic, or mark selected items as very important ones for a specific project.
The Chinese-speaking world is clearly an area where this version of Zotero should prove very useful, so having the software and citation styles in Chinese is pretty important.
When sorting items, you can add additional sort columns by clicking the icon at the top-right of the items pane; you can choose Date Added or Date Modified. There is not a way of keeping track of when you last used an item in a document, unfortunately.
I quickly checked online and found Chinese version Zotero at some Chinese websites. However, I could not install any of them successfully. Maybe it is for windows users, while i use Macbook pro.
Some Chinese people posted that mostly they use locally developed reference management softwares, some of them use Endnote or Noteexpress (Chinese version) for English materials. They are interested in some new software if it can not only support Chinese, but also compatible to local libraries in China. They said that the biggest problem rests with the different database system of research libraries in China.
Sorry, I know nothing about IT professional thing.
For additional sort columns, I know there is Date Added or Date Modified. I wonder if Zotero can show CITED NUMBER of each scholar article, like Google Scholar website, in which I can see say "cite by 230" for each journal article. If I can sort all library item by CITED NUMBER, it help me organize "more important" and "less important" references.
But note that the automated requests can get you locked out of Google Scholar.
A problem I have is Zotero entering the "place published" field twice for all the bibliography entries. For example: "臺北" (Taipei) becomes "臺北, 臺北". It's doing it for all sources, not just Chinese ones.
I have tried undoing changes I made in the preferences panel of Zotero, but Zotero is still entering whatever is written in the "place published" field twice. What's happening? How can I fix it?
What style are you using? Also, please export an entry as Bibliontology RDF, re-import it to confirm that it still fails for you after import, then paste the exported code to http://gist.github.com, and save it as a "Public Gist". Post the URL back here, and I'll take a look.
It was caused by a flaw in the style, or in Zotero depending on how you look at it. Under the hood, there is just one "place" variable in Zotero, which serves for the CSL-side values "event-place", "publisher-place" and "archive-place". As a result, the value of those three CSL variables will always be the same, at least in Zotero; and so only one of the three should be used in a given citation -- otherwise you get the duplicate output that you've seen.
The "archive-place" variable is actually not mapped to CSL at all in mainstream Zotero, so it always turns up empty. MLZ maps it from the Zotero-side "place" variable (like the other two), so the weirdness only appears in MLZ.
I've adjusted the style to render "archive-place" only if there is also a value for "archive" or "archive_location", which should solve the problem for almost all cases. If I remember correctly, the change will take about 30 minutes to feed through to zotero.org/styles.