Hi everyone!
I just started using Scrivener and I love the interface. However, I’m used to work in Google Docs with Zotero and live citations. I’ve noticed two things that I would love your help with.
When I try to export my Scrivener file as RTF so Zotero can scan the citations and create a bibliography it won’t recognize other footnotes. I use the CF option to typea regular footnote with info I want to add, and then I use it in another line to add a footnote used for citation. When exporting through Zotero to RTF, it will give me the final bibliography, but will not include footnotes that aren’t citations. Is there a way to include them but only for informative notes, and not citations?
ex.
This is a note where I go in depth in a topic
{Brysk, 2017}
I’m starting to write my PhD dissertation with Scrivener, and I have several citations from the same author and year. When I use Zotero in Google Docs it will automatically designate one as “a” and the other one as “b” (f.e. Perez, 2007a and Perez, 2007b). Is there a way to automatically do so in Scrivener with Zotero? I wouldn’t want to go back every time and try to remember which one is which after 100 pages of writing lol.
Are you using the Export, or the Compile command in Scrivener?
Do you want informational and bibliographical notes to be numbered together, or separately? To get separate numbers, the recommended practice is to use inline footnotes for citations, and inspector footnotes for information (or vice versa). Similarly if you want to place one set as footnotes and the other as endnotes.
You’d need to contact the Zotero people for a definitive answer, but I would expect it to simply ignore any “note” that doesn’t contain a Zotero-style citation, and to use its own database to disambiguate multiple sources from the same author. Scrivener itself has no knowledge of Zotero’s database.
I don’t use Zotero or RTF personally, but this issue sound like a problem with the RTF scan mechanism itself… The docs (rtf_scan [Zotero Documentation]) for RTF scan mention:
It is important to note that, if you selected a citation format which calls for footnotes or endnotes, they will only appear properly if you open the Output File in a full-featured word processor, such as Microsoft Word or LibreOffice.
As an aside (given the RTF scan docs suggest that the ODF plugin is “better”) I just tested using the ODF Scan (RTF/ODF-Scan for Zotero) and at least mixed footnotes seem to be preserved:
It is Zotero itself that generates the final in-text citation format and using letters for disambiguation are part of a particular citation format? During writing is is up to you to use the temporary citation format and you could use the {Smith, "Title", 2009} style to make sure each ref is clearly identified if there is an author-year collision? That format is at least the default if you use Zotero RTF cite style.
The ODF scan uses a unique ID and so it also doesn’t have any problems with author-year ambiguity. Note for ODT you would either need to convert from RTF using LibreOffice, or use the MMD compiler output (but that may be a big change to your workflow).
This is a potential issue with any RTF output, whether Zotero is involved or not. Not all RTF-based editors implement the full RTF specification. Especially relevant for Mac users, TextEdit not only fails to display footnotes, but discards them from the file.
