Importing from Endnotes

janetterutterford
I am having trouble importing endnotes into zotero. I managed to copy across 140 articles all at once (in RIS format), which worked fine, but for some reason I don't seem to be able to import anymore across in bulk. When I try it will only import one article at a time.

Any ideas? I am using endnote x3 and zotero 2.1.6.
  • noksagt
    Please include a brief (two record?) example of what won't import, between <code> tags & say what happens when you try to import it.
  • janetterutterford
    Sorry not sure what you mean by code tags.
    When I import the records across, only the first one copies across. I get no error messages.
  • noksagt
    edited April 26, 2011
    Sorry not sure what you mean by code tags.
    The most important part of the request was for a two-record example. If you can't figure out how to use <code> HTML tags to preserve the formatting of the text (this forum software, at minimum, removes spaces (which matter in RIS)), then just paste it without them.

    But to use them, type something like:&lt;code&gt;TY - JOUR
    AU - Shannon,Claude E.
    PY - 1948/07//
    TI - A Mathematical Theory of Communication
    JO - Bell System Technical Journal
    SP - 379
    EP - 423
    VL - 27
    ER - &lt;/code&gt;
    When I import the records across, only the first one copies across. I get no error messages.
    I cannot replicate this. I seem to remember people reporting something similar in the past & it has turned out to be that they weren't actually exporting more than one reference.
  • janetterutterford
    Thanks. Two examples as follows:

    TY - Book
    AU - Wright, Robert E
    AU - Sylla, Robert
    PB - Pickering and Chatto
    PY - 2003
    ST - History of Corporate Finance
    TI - History of Corporate Finance
    ID - 517
    ER - (blank)

    TY - Book
    AU - Zola, Emile
    OP - 1891
    PB - Pocket Classics
    PY - 1991
    ST - L'Argent
    TI - L'Argent
    ID - 1012
    ER- (blank)

    I have tried to import anything between 2-150 records and only the first record copies across, so I am unclear as to why/how I managed to copy 140 records across but unable to do this since.
  • noksagt
    "book" is not a valid RIS type. Your second record is missing spaces in the ER tag.TY - Book
    AU - Wright, Robert E
    AU - Sylla, Robert
    PB - Pickering and Chatto
    PY - 2003
    ST - History of Corporate Finance
    TI - History of Corporate Finance
    ID - 517
    ER - (blank)

    TY - Book
    AU - Zola, Emile
    OP - 1891
    PB - Pocket Classics
    PY - 1991
    ST - L'Argent
    TI - L'Argent
    ID - 1012
    ER - (blank)    Imports for me just fine (with the caveat that they are typed as documents instead of books). Copy it & select import from clipboard.
  • janetterutterford
    Thanks. Both the documents transferred across when amended which is something! However, I am a little confused as some of the 140 records I managed to transfer were "books", and they imported across fine.

    Also I have over 1000 records to transfer. To go through and manually changed the "book" titles is somewhat time consuming and slightly offputting. It seems very unhelpful that in Zotero "book" is not a valid RIS type when it's such a common source of information. Thanks anyway for sorting this out for me.
  • adamsmith
    you're misunderstanding - this is not "in Zotero" but "as defined by the RIS standard". Endnote (again...) seems to be producing non-standard RIS output.
    See for yourself:
    http://www.refman.com/support/risformat_reftypes.asp
    The valid item type in RIS is "BOOK" in all capitals. It would seem relatively easy to search and replace
    TY - Book
    with
    TY - BOOK

    in your ris file.
  • RintzeRintze
    But in this case (pun intended), Zotero's RIS importer can easily be modified to rely on a case-insensitive match, right?
  • adamsmith
    I don't see why not but someone more familiar with the types of RIS we might see would have to weigh in.
  • ajlyon
    I've put together a version that forces uppercase on types.

    Please go to http://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/raw/master/RIS.js and save the file to the translators directory of your Zotero data directory (http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data).

    It should start working. If this works for you, please post here so that I can submit this change to be pushed to all users.
  • DWL-SDCA
    Please remember to include on import the conditional tag fixes:

    AB = N2
    DO = M3

    with the revised version.

    Also, it would be helpful to test the SN field and (if it is 8 characters without a "-" separating the two four character strings) make sure that the proper hyphen is added.

    Certainly, the export to RIS should continue to use the standard and not one of the popular variants.

    Thanks
  • ajlyon
    This version has the AB and DO logic in it, and some logic to account for missing spaces in the input, as often happens.

    I'm a little hesitant to add much more logic to SN processing-- as we've discussed, the hyphen in ISSN is purely cosmetic. I have code already written to validate the ISSN (it has a check digit) and add the hyphen, but I think I want to hold off on adding it until we actually need to distinguish between ISBN and ISSN -- right now no types have both. When the schema change happens, we'll need to distinguish them and the code will be added, I suppose.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited May 3, 2011
    As I recall, there are several titles published (by Springer and by Elsevier) that are treated as both journals and book series. At any rate, the publications have both an issn that doesn't change and an ISBN that does with each issue/volume. I will look through my records, identify them, and list some of them here.

    I use Zotero to grab article records from journal publishers that aren't equipped to send me article metadata by FTP. Zotero each week saves hours of work involved in adding article records into SafetyLit. I'll edit my import import from MODS script to add the hyphen -- my "find the journal in a nearby library" utility uses the OCLC WorldCat system and that requires the ISSN with a hyphen. Strange, because the hyphen gets stripped out during the journal identification process.

    My use of Zotero is written into the letters of agreement with several publishers. I am trying to work with the publishers to get their metadata standardized and to make it Zotero-ready. (SafetyLit is a free online bibliographic database that contains articles from the scholarly literature of more than 30 distinct professional disciplines and more than 11,000 scholarly journals. SafetyLit is presented without advertising.)
  • ajlyon
    It's pretty ridiculous that the OCLC system requires the hyphen-- since of course it will be stripped out. I can provide you with an RIS importer that forces the hyphen, and validates the ISSN, if you're interested.

    It's pretty clear that ISSN will be added for books in the next schema update, with Zotero 2.2 or 3.0. What other item types will require both ISBN and ISSN, in your experience?
  • DWL-SDCA
    I promised an example of a publication that has both and ISSN and a series of ISBNs.

    Industrial Safety Series (Elsevier)
    ISSN: 0921-9110

    ISBN: 978-0-444-53081-3
    ISBN: 978-0-444-52119-4
    ISBN: 978-0-444-82881-1

    There are many other examples from Elsevier and a few from Springer and Sage. If you want more of them let me know and I will find and report others.

    I contacted the folks at WorldCat about the hyphen issue and they agreed. They said that the hyphen will no longer be required.

    As you said the ISSN hyphen is purely cosmetic. However, I would rather not have a mix of journal ISSN records in SafetyLit with and without the hyphen. I have modified the SafetyLit import from MODS to add the hyphen and validate the ISSN.
  • ajlyon
    So I think we'll need to add ISBN for the upcoming "periodical" type: https://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/issues/23

    Thanks for providing a concrete example.

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