Druid, I don’t see how this is relevant. Many things on earth have been invented for one purpose and reconfigured, adapted, and hacked.
Keith: I would just suggest that a real, hardcore plugin (the kind involving field codes or something like that) is vastly less reliable that the kind relying on a scan (and I think the scan is always best left until after the export…) And probably hard to implement anyway. Perhaps you might look into integrating–as Mellel does with Sente and Bookends–with some citation manager in a way that would allow citation objects and/or a palette.
Hopefully Zotero will further develop its scan functionality. I don’t understand why they didn’t start with that, since it’s the most open, reliable, and I think simplest way to work with citations. I’d much rather type “{Derrida, 1995@34}” than use the mouse, click on an icon, call the citation manager, and watch it insert easily corruptible field codes!
Thanks everyone. I realize that there are so many variables in software, on top of all the user needs due to our diverse workflows and foibles. I’m amazed that various ones work together as well as they do, and again let me underscore how much I appreciate Scrivener and Keith’s ongoing efforts to make it better and better.
@kithairon Thanks so much! I explored your many practical suggestions, including downloading the rtf-scan-dragdrop.csl. Here I have to confess knowing just enough to get myself into trouble, but not quite enough to get myself out: the language in the forum says “drag and drop into firefox and change preferences” but how do I drag and drop to FF, and which preferences do I need to change? And then - to further underscore my newbieness - how exactly am I supposed to use this drag and drop feature? I’ve been approaching citations by doing the following:
while writing in Scrivener, I type my citation in curly brackets: {Pommette, 2011}
once I’m done and ready for prime time, I export the document from Scrivener saving it as an rtf
I go to Zotero’s action gear, select rtf scan
when the menu comes up, I select the exported rtf Scrivener file as the input file, then choose the same file as my output file (maybe this is wrong? - but I had trouble getting it to save another name, and bounced around in that input-output menu for awhile until the Zotero bibliography matches came up)
a Zotero message comes up that said it is complete, that I should inspect my new file, which I did - this last time it seemed to work better - at least I saw the citations, but frankly I’m not sure why!
So if someone with more experience has advice about how I could take the mystery out of my own workflow, I would be forever in your debt. Even something basic like where the files should be stored (do people create a special conversion folder?), document naming conventions to prevent over-writing or contradictions, would be very useful. I’m new to so much, so my learning curve is steep. But I’m an eager, grateful student! Thanks in advance.
When I call Bookends from Scrivener and control-command-y I insert a citation with a p#, a special id, and any special formatting (exclude author, don’t enclose final citation, etc). It is text like this in Scrivener: “{Author, 1997, #449505443@34}”. Mellel recognizes this as a special object (so you delete the whole object by clicking back once). It is a colored snippet of text, easily visible as a citation (this alone is very useful of course). In the palette (the formatting sidebar) there is a list of citations. I can click on a citation I’ve already used and it will insert it. If I option click on a citation object, it brings me back to the citation in my Bookends database. There is probably more to the integration than I can recall now, but that is what I can think of at the moment.
Now, I’m not sure how difficult it is to implement something like that, nor do I know how big would be the payoff, since the way Scrivener works with Bookends already works fine (that main difference–for me at least–is really the palette and the citation object).
You’ve downloaded the style mentioned above; let’s say the RTF-Scan-Dragdrop.csl-file is on your desktop. You have FF open and running, with a Zotero-panel visible in the lower part of your FF-window. Drag & drop the RTF-Scan-Dragdrop.csl file from the desktop into the upper part of the FF-window. You should be prompted by a box asking whether you want to install this style. Affirm and then go to the Zotero-pane: “Preferences>Export>Default Output format” scroll down an set this to the newly acquired “RTF-Scan Style”. Every time you want to paste a ref from Zotero you chose its entry in the main panel, copy it with Cmd+Shift+C and paste it into Scrivener – you should get something like {author, date} of your Zotero item. Alternatively, instead of Cmd-Shift-C, you could simply drag the the item from Zotero’s center pane to your Scrivener document to the same effect. When you’re done with your draft go again to Zotero’s prefs, change your Export style from RTF-Scan to whatever style you need for your institution or journal and then do the RTF-Scan exactly as you have described it. Don’t worry about overwriting your exported rtf-document from Scrivener, even if you don’t change its name, Zotero will add “(Scanned)” to the file name.
I love being dissed by a duck. My point is: let’s not clog Scrivener with tools that may require much testing and maintenance, for a very small user base. But if you have caught Keith’s interest with all this arcana, so be it. Quack.
Excellent – I’m getting closer, thanks, kithairon! This leaves me with a few more questions:
What’s the best way to work with Zotero in Scrivener – can I bring it into a parallel editing window?
In some of the styles the curly brackets remain after the scan, even in a couple of Chicago Manual ones where I don’t think this is supposed to happen. Why is this?
I can’t find a style that allows me to do superscript footnote numbers – is this just not one of the options, or am I needing to click something different?
What happens when I’m adding to a text that I’ve imported to Scrivener that already has notes from Word but not based in Zotero? Should I just strip the old notes and start from scratch? (This will be less and less of a problem as I move more directly into Scrivener, but it would be good to know!)
I tried an experiment where I combined the cmd-shft-c, paste method with directly entering a zotero reference by typing the author’s name and year in curly brackets – in the completed scanned version, complete cites based on my curly bracketed entries showed up in the bibliography at the end but not in the text itself where I originally put them, so it was as if I was simply preparing a bibliography rather than a cite that referred to it. Any thoughts?
thanks much!
Use Spaces. Have Scrivener in one space for undistracted writing and FF with Zotero open in another.
Any curly brackets remaining in your scanned Ms mean that the scan didn’t pick these up; check whether there is something not corresponding to the specs; check the Zotero item you’re trying to refer to; sometimes simply typing them anew seems to help.
Try here: zotero.org/styles/ (If you hover over a style’s name, you’ll see how it will look). If you can’t find anything, ask in Zotero’s forum; people over there may be able to help more.
Not sure what you mean by “notes”. If you mean citations it’s probably best to wrap them in curlies so they will become part of the new bibliography the RTF-Scan produces.
Sounds strange. Experiment: paste a citation from Z and type the same reference manually in curly brackets – any difference? Choose another final output style. If the issue persits, post at Z’s forum (using the term “RTF-Scan” in the heading of your post).
Thank you very much. I experimented - a lot! - and am coming to the conclusion that, at least for me right now, Scrivener and Zotero won’t be friends. Some of the options that looked good in the sample just hang and never open, others produce different outcomes than what the samples suggest. There are just too many variables that need to be taken into account, so it makes sense to plan a workflow that involves Word as the end product. If anyone can prove me wrong, I will be delighted. For now, I don’t have more time to invest, as I’m sure is the case with all the helpful forum souls as well. The good news is that I learned a few new tricks along the way, and saw first-hand what a great community can be like. Thanks especially to kithailon.
You could draft in Scrivener, adding your citations manually in whatever format you recognize, export as rtf to Word/NeoOffice and plough through the manual refs in your exported text with Zotero’s word plug-in (for Word/ Office) working through your text at the end. This would still leave you with the CLS style system that Zotero (Mendeley+Papers) use. Whichever way you go - good luck, kithairon
Scrivener and Zotero don’t naturally interact, but I’ve found the following kludge to work quite well for me.
Create citations in Zotero in Firefox.
Paste citations into MS Word. Zotero has a hot key for this, or you can use drag and drop. This gives you a beautifully formatted bibliography that you can tweak any way you wish.
Copy and paste into Scrivener.
Sounds slow and stupid, but it’s fast and works.
Come the end of days–lions and lambs lying down together, etc.–Scrivener and Zotero will interact beautifully. Until then, this works for me.
very enlightening thread & information. I’ve just finished my first class toward a Masters in social sciences. Initially I gave Scrivener a look, but quickly assumed it was too complex for what I needed. After reading this thread, and the issues with references & bibilography amongst academic writers, I may be back at Scrivener. The paper I constructed for the end-of-class 40% of our grade effort was put together using Word on my Mac. All the information here leads me to believe it will take another program to handle the references and keep the bibliography in order when it comes time to compile the paper.
My main reason for posting was to simply say “thank you” to each of the contributors here for taking the time and effort to help problem-solve the bibliography issue. And to say “Hi” to Kevin
I’m about to pull the trigger on buying Scrivener, but before I do so just wanted to see if there had been any movement in terms of making it play well with Zotero.
I’m a history PhD student looking to use it for my dissertation writing, but wanted something that would work as well with Zotero as MS Word does. Has the Scrivener team developed something that would allow me to use Zotero with Scrivener in the same way I can use Zotero with Word?
There haven’t been any announcements of any work by the Scrivener team in this area. I’m not sure it’s in their remit, actually – I would have thought it would be down to the people at Zotero, but perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree. I don’t like Zotero myself, so I don’t use it. Personally, I’ve used both Bookends and lately Sente very happily with Scrivener, so there is bibliographic software available that works perfectly well with Scrivener, and I know there are people here who use EndNote with it.
Martin.
PS: I wrote a 90,000 word thesis with about 250 references using Scrivener / Bookends / Sente, so I know it can work.
Here is what you need to make Zotero work. For a while, this feature wasn’t working well, but I’ve heard the newer versions work better. This, incidentally, is precisely what all of the other citation managers are doing as well. As Martin points out, this has really nothing at all to do with Scrivener. It’s the citation manager that is responsible for taking a piece of text in an RTF file, recognising it, and turning it into the styled text you require. In Scrivener, it’s just {sometext, 2012}.
You need to encourage Zotero to improve their RTF scan functionality. Last time I tried (a few months ago) it was dreadful (to the extent of being pointless), and based on discussion on the Zotero forum improving it doesn’t seem to be a priority for the Zotero developers. Whilst Endnote has many negatives, its RTF scan is excellent. I don’t understand why neither Zotero or Mendeley seem to value good RTF scan functionality.
I agree. But I would also say that not all academic writers like the temp citation key method of writing papers that is required for RTF scan (I would say a relatively small minority are ok with it; most seem to prefer to use cite-while-you-write plugins in order to see formated citations as they write). Therefore, it would be great if Scrivener could provide the tools to enable developers of the reference managers to write cite-while-you-write plugins for Scrivener.
I’m not sure how you can possibly know this. I don’t want to sound dismissive, so forgive me if it seems that way, but I would have thought that the only way one could be sure of this would be by conducting quite a large survey. OK, you say “seem”, but I still think it’s pushing things a bit to say this, and I can’t say I’ve had the same impression myself. And if you count the users of Bookends, Sente or Bibdesk, there must be tens of thousands of people who are happily using temporary citation markers, because none of those applications have cite-while-you-write (as far as I know).
For what it is worth (OK, not much, I’d say!), I detested CWYW when I used Endnote (long gone from my workflow, thank God), and I’d sooner shoot myself than use it. And given that Scrivener keeps its text in potentially thousands of small rtf files, I wonder if it would be technically feasible to incorporate CWYW in Scrivener. I think Keith once mentioned looking at the possibility, but I would have thought that building the bibliography on the fly might cause some complications.
Yeah, I think the preference to use write-and-cite is a bit overstated, and probably more a matter of familiarity than any case of actual superiority. I speak only for what I’ve gathered as feedback from the many people I’ve worked with in getting them fixed up with how Scrivener works. Once I explain the system to them are quite happy with it and find it easy to use, and I’ve even had some say they prefer it to the way Word works (presumably with the EndNote add-on). It’s very rare that someone has an adverse reaction to the news that there is no CWYW plug-in.
I’m no academic, and only use these systems from a testing and design standpoint, but from what I’ve seen anyway, the plug-in systems don’t seem to provide an obviously superior interface to using the full citation manager interface to interact with the database, and often adding a cite is as much or even more work as dragging a cite in from one window another, or using the Cmd-Y/Cmd-Y pattern that Scrivener facilitates. The main thing you get is the list which serves as a nice bibliography. That is something that could definitely be useful in Scrivener, particularly because of its many-small-files philosophy, though as Martin points out, that right there is the biggest performance limitation. It’s one thing to scan a long open document and quite another to scan 500 documents that represent the same length of text.
But sure, it is indeed something on the long-term list of things to investigate. Keep in mind that most plug-ins are actually written by the citation manager company, not by the word processor company. Microsoft might coordinate with EndNote in an unofficial capacity, but it’s EndNote that codes and provides the add-on; same goes for RefWorks etc. We haven’t yet attracted the level of attention that Microsoft Office has. There are some processors that have their own system rolled in, but most of them have more bandwidth than Keith. Mellel is the only exception I am aware of, it’s a one-man-band as well, and has Bookends and Sente integration. So for the most part my original comment still stands.
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