zotero-better-bibtex VS translators

There a zotero plugin that stores the entire contents of your zotero db as an auto-updated bibtex file too.

https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex

Thanks for sharing these. I already use a number of these on your list. Though I don't use copy-by-link for files. For me one of the key purposes of zotero is that its the place where I keep these files so I don't have to keep them elsewhere where they aren't as easily searchable.

I'm excited to try the duplicates merger tool, I've been forever putting off this because the normal way is such a slog. The Tag one also looks good.

To add to the list, my key add-ons are:

- better bibtex, this one is essential for me as a latex user

- zotfile. This one is cool because if you add annotations to a pdf, like highlighting or comments while you read it, then zotfile will pull those out into notes in the zotero entry. This makes it really easy to see both that I've read this document, and what parts I thought were important.

[1] https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/)

I was going to suggest that you ask the BBT dev about it as I had no idea why that didn't work, then I saw this bug from 3 days ago: Bug: citekey formula does not update. That might be the issue!

Another problem is that no matter how much I tried, the two available Zotero plugins for Obsidian do not work for me (this https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-zotero-integration and this https://github.com/hans/obsidian-citation-plugin). I am not sure if that is because I'm on Linux, but they just don't work. However, RStudio on Linux works great with Zotero, and I can easily add citations using the Better BibTeX for Zotero plugin (https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex) to create citation keys. That way, I can simply copy/paste the citation key (e.g. '@lastname2020') in the text and have it render into the citation when I render the file in Rstudio. I sometimes write documents with > 300 references, and Zotero running in a Windows VM, trying to refresh a huge word document would take a long time, and would lead to corrupt citations. That's no problem with a markdown/Rmarkdown document.

I have the Better BibTeX plugin in Zotero installed, which keeps ~/Research/refs.bib up-to-date with my entire Zotero library.

P.S. Better BibTeX addon grants even more luxurious experience.

I've been using the Better Bibtex plugin for zotero for a couple months now, and so far it seems to work flawlessly. You can export a .bib file attached to a zotero collection or library and it will automatically update it as you add things to the collection.

I use Zotero with the better bibtex addon. Works great. When I first started using zotero, I imported my existing bibtex library, so all my existing bibtex keys all worked. I use zotero as my library for everything and add bibtex keys to things I cite.

https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/

Better bibtex

> `` tags "using the Google/Highwire key-value system" sounds prommising -- but I'm having trouble finding a list of valid keys at the documentation linked to!

They're in the Indexing section of the linked Google page, just formatted in a particularly unreadable manner:

https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html#in...

That will let you specify a PDF (`citation_pdf_url`) as well.

Should be mostly self-explanatory, but you can see Zotero's mappings here:

https://github.com/zotero/translators/blob/b18eeac0f770c698f...

> I wish there was a way I could provide the cite in CSL!

We're planning to support `` elements to any supported format — basically a modern replacement for unAPI, which went defunct before CSL could be listed as an option — but CSL wouldn't let you specify a PDF anyway. And most sites want the search engine indexing they get from embedded metadata.

Looks like the Zotero devs have already done that [1]. You can probably just vendor the repo in a browser extension, I'd think.

[1] https://github.com/zotero/translators

JavaScript translators created with the visual editor (although probably less reliable than translators created by an experienced JS developer) will be compatible with Zotero's translation server, and could be further refined to be posted for review to the Zotero's translators repository.