Zotero integration/plugin/workflow at least!

Scrivener Wish List
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I’ve used Scrivener for years and it was great for writing textbooks and academic papers, but since version 7 of Zotero has come out, the previous workarounds for in-line citations no longer work and it’s REALLY made it difficult to manage writing any referenced papers using Scrivener.

So much of what is good about Scrivener is now so hard to use because of the lack of this one feature, and it is the one area that kills any enthusiasm for Scrivener amongst my students as bibliography and reference management is so high a priority.

I appreciate that this has been mentioned multiple times over the years in the fora, however while roundtripping via Libre Office or Open Office was a pain, it at least worked and the benefits of Scrivener were worth the inconvenience. Now that I can’t even do that, Scrivener is much less use to me and it’s a real shame as I love using it for these sorts of projects.

Is there any way you could please provide native integration for Zotero in the next upgrade, or at least some sort of workaround that means that I can use Scrivener again for academic work that requires citations? This one thing would massively increase uptake amongst academic writers and our students, as Word is just not a great platform for how we work (though unfortunately it does have a Zotero plugin!).

Thanks for looking at this - I appreciate that the upgrade of Zotero has been the major issue here rather than anything that has changed in Scrivener, but unfortunately the end result is the same for the end user, no matter which program instigated the change!

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Note that we don’t provide native integration for any other bibliography software, either. Our philosophy has always been to be platform agnostic: we don’t have the resources to support all of the options that exist, so we seek to offer a method that allows users to choose whichever platform they prefer.

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That’s understandable, but there currently isn’t a way to do that in Scrivener, and it’s a huge part of the academic writing workflow. I wrote a 350,000+ word textbook in 2020 with the previous version of Zotero and Scrivener, but that currently wouldn’t be possible due to this issue. I’m currently trying to write a journal article with much fewer references, but after spending a couple of hours trying to figure out a workaround, I came to the conclusion it would be simpler to use Word (which I loathe).

Unfortunately, this may be the beginning of the end of my love affair with Scrivener, which is a real shame, having used it for over a decade for most of my output, but the lack of this one feature is really impairing my ability to create anything with the otherwise best writing software I’ve used.

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Would the developers of Zotero be of help to you?

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We’re sorry you feel that way.

It seems to me, though, that this is a problem that Zotero created, and therefore they would be the appropriate people to approach for a fix. (Or the software that should be abandoned if they won’t/can’t fix it.)

FWIW, this is exactly why we tend to not create direct integrations with third-party software. When the third-party company goes out of business, abandons the platform, or otherwise makes integration impossible, we’re the ones stuck without a way to migrate our users.

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This isn’t a criticism of Scrivener, but it’s the unfortunate reality of the situation. My understanding from speaking to colleagues who use other reference managers such as Mendeley or End Note is that they have similar issues. Zotero is at least an open-source program, so from that perspective is the least likely to go out of business or leave you high and dry (one of the reasons it is widely used).

My understanding of Zotero’s position is that their software by default tends to produce in-line citations to allow dynamic management of references, but Scrivener does not support this. While there are multiple big universities and educational establishments that have tried to publish workarounds (e.g. Scrivener - Zotero at Cornell - LibGuides at Cornell University) it would be so helpful (and a massive boost to academic writers), if this was a less onerous procedure. I honestly believe you’d see an almost overnight huge uptake in customers, as Scrivener does everything else that I would want in an academic writing program, but this is a HUGE are that I can’t currently address.

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AFAIK there’s a guide here that should explain how to link Scrivener to any kind of bibliography software you want.

Hope it helps.

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Note, there are Scrivener users who successfully use Zotero without issue. There were two workflows before Zotero 7 was released, and the ODT scan route you used was removed with the new Zotero version (though a motivated developer could probbly fix it I think, just that the original dev has moved on, this is part and parcel of free and open source). But there is still a workflow that, in my opinion, is superior, that uses temporary citations like you used before, but replaces ODT scan plugin with Zotero’s amazing BetterBibTeX plugin allowing you to use citekeys and thus any output compatible with that.

The wiki post covers the details, but Scrivener supports this workflow explicitly, it was designed for temp citations like this and automated output to tools that will build your final document, including (not limited to) things like LaTeX that are leagues ahead of Word for academic content.

EDIT: I do overall agree that L&L should think of better ways to integrate bibliography generation into their compiler (the BBT workflow has several moving parts and does require effort to set up, it is not plug-n-play). My suggestion Academic Bibliographies: support citeproc as an option during compile has been for them to keep the temp citation workflow as-is, but add a compile-time option to use a citeproc engine (like Zotero, pandoc, mendeley and many others). This would work for any reference manager, and is relatively simple (citeproc is designed with an API to replace temp with final cites) allowing Scrivener to offer native bibliographies in any of its output formats. Replacing MMD with Pandoc would also allow them to offer this for any of their MMD-based outputs.

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I really appreciate you engaging with this, and I’ve spent the last three hours looking at the threads and wiki articles that you’ve linked to and trying to get it to work for me, but I’m really coming up short. I’m not a programmer but think I’m reasonably computer literate, and even after installing homebrew/pandoc, looking at your SimpleCitations template (which works beautifully), I can’t mimic the setup. I now can’t even drag and drop a citation from Zotero to create a citation now that I’ve changed the export options.

For me the issue is where I’m going to be spending my effort/time - I loved using Scrivener with drag and drop citations, but now I can’t seem to get even the basics to work without having to learn at least something about coding, and it’s not an area that I have time to learn. As much as I don’t like Word, at least I can click a button, put a reference in and then have a useable bibliography at the end. Even if I could get the current workflow to work for me I’d have to jump through multiple hoops for each paper/chapter/book as far as I can see (export .bib or .json files into a project, then into a separate folder that has to have a -mmd suffix to compile into, then edit the metadata in the front of the scrivening before reconfiguring the compiler to output a .doc .pdf etc). I appreciate that for people with a background in this area it’s probably pretty elementary, but this really isn’t my bag!

I’d love to have more students and colleagues using Scrivener, but the problem is that since the changes (which I appreciate are due to the Zotero update), the amount of effort necessary to even set this up is now an order of magnitude higher than the reward. Word can do this in seconds and I REALLY wish Scrivener could have this too.

Alternately, if someone wants to set this up for me and show me how to get it working so I can go back to using Scrivener, you’d have a friend for life!

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Why not just use Zotero 6?

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It is a totally valid request. A core of academic users do use workflows that are more complex (LaTeX itself being the best example), but that doesn’t mean everyone can handle the same workflow. Installing a chain of tools with config files in various places can feel totally overblown for your needs. I can argue my way gains a much more powerful workflow that can flex way beyond the limits of word, but most people just want a direct visual solution to a problem. I want as many academic users to use Scrivener (where the Binder and all the other features is a total gamechanger), and while I know KB will not rebuild his text engine to inject custom code as Word/ODT do (we will not get CWYW or an internal bib manager etc) having a compiler workflow for bibliography output cross-app would really help. Done by the compiler, using Pandoc or citeproc internally and just as Scrivener already does for its EPUB and other outputs, hide the details of the chain-of-tools used.

If you are interested PM me and we can perhaps arrange a small tutorial sometime next week if you want.

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PM’d - thank you! Really appreciate everyone’s input so far!

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I’m not a Zotero user, so my contribution probably won’t be of much practical value to you, @peterlax. But hopefully it is not totally superflous.

The citation manager I use is Bookends (macOS and iOS/iPadOS only, not free), and it works great with Scrivener. What’s interesting is why: Neither Scrivener has any Bookends integration—as @kewms said, Lit&Lat don’t do that for third party software—nor does Bookends have any Scrivener integration.

You can set up the default writing application in Bookends (it offers a floating panel for occasionally used other applications). If you are writing in Scrivener and Bookends is running, pressing CMD+y brings the Bookends window to the front, you select a quote, and the same keystroke now brings Scrivener back to the front and inserts the quote at the cursor position where you left off.

Moving the respective application windows to the front uses a standard MacOS function, and the standard MacOS clipboard is the intermediary for copying the quote from Bookends and pasting it into Scrivener.

In my opinion, this leaves no doubt as to which side needs to move in order for Scrivener and Zotero to work together (at least more) seamlessly. And if Zotero used standard MacOS features, that would not only benefit Scrivener users, but also users of all other writing applications accessible via MacOS standards.

However, it does not sound like switching to another citation manager is an option for you or your students. But Bookends does offer [Zotero import, even multiple imports] (Bookends — Importing from other apps).

Finally, would a clipboard manager help? I use Paste, which has “pinboards”, and I have dedicated one of them to references only. On the Mac, Paste is just a keystroke away, and on the iPhone and iPad it has its own keyboard. (I’m sure other apps offer something similar—just in case anyone thinks these are all affiliate links. No, they’re not.) You fill a pinboard with a bunch of your recent references in the proper Zotero format and have them right at your fingertips. And later, Zotero will create a bibliography from them.

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