MODS and identifiers in zotero exports

CSL Development
1

Hi,

I know it’s a bit OT … I’m trying to make the MODS parser of the
Haskell implementation compatible with zotero exported MODS, but
there’s a problem with IDs. In bibutils each mods element comes with an
ID attribute and an identifier element.

In Zotero MODS exported items there’s no identifier, neither as a mods
element attribute nor as a separate element. In the bibtex export the
id is generated with the name and the title.

I think I need direction by someone more expert then me.

Thanks
Andrea

2

I’d follow bibutils and file a bug report with Zotero.

The business of ids, particularly as then tied to citations in
documents, is a big problem. Both bibtex keys and xml id attributes
are local ids. This wrks rather poorly for citations in my view. It’s
one of the reasons I favor the RDF approach to identifying things: a
(global) URI.

Bruce

3

Oh, I guess you’re problem is you’re looking for ids where they don’t exist?

I still think you ought to encourage the Zotero team to add this, but
in the interim, I guess one option is a pre-processing script that
adds the ids? What else could you do?

Bruce

4

For the time being an id is being generated by using some letters from
the title. What I was wondering is whether someone using Zotero as a
bibliographic manager had an idea on how to generate ids that can be
used in citations. Is there a rule, a common practise, anything?

I mean, having a collection of items you cannot cite because there’s
no identifier to retrieve them is quite useless, so I was wondering
if/how someone came to cope with this problem.

It could be cool to be able to use a Zotero DB together with citeproc,
but if there’s no way to get to know, or even set, the ID of an item,
there’s no room for using Zotero as a DB.

Andrea

PS: I see that the RDF export has an id, which is probably the Zotero
internal id. But if it is merely internal, it seems to be useless.
Maybe I’m missing something…

5

For the time being an id is being generated by using some letters from
the title. What I was wondering is whether someone using Zotero as a
bibliographic manager had an idea on how to generate ids that can be
used in citations. Is there a rule, a common practise, anything?

If you look at their bibtex export, they generate the keys, probably
using some combination of author and year, and maybe title (?).

I mean, having a collection of items you cannot cite because there’s
no identifier to retrieve them is quite useless,

Indeed.

so I was wondering if/how someone came to cope with this problem.

I doubt people use Zotero’s MODS export for this use case.

It could be cool to be able to use a Zotero DB together with citeproc,
but if there’s no way to get to know, or even set, the ID of an item,
there’s no room for using Zotero as a DB.

Not exactly. Try exporting to bibtex, and then running it through
bibutils? That should at least give you automatic ids.

The only problem with this approach is if you’re citing stuff bibtex
doesn’t support.

PS: I see that the RDF export has an id, which is probably the Zotero
internal id. But if it is merely internal, it seems to be useless.
Maybe I’m missing something…

The current Zotero RDF support is less-than-ideal, but I believe they
have plans to enhance it (including supporting bibo).

Bruce