Exporting sources to citation manager software

[Teresa C]

I'm writing a thesis for a family history diploma, and need to use a specific referencing style (CMoS17). I have literally thousands of references in Reunion, and would love to be able to export them in some format to my citation manager software (Zotero) so I can insert them in to my thesis in the correct style.
Does anyone know if this is possible?
Thanks!
Teresa

[Ryan_N]

Hi Teresa,

I'm confident this is doable and use Zotero regularly. Usually, I too have to cite/footnote in Chicago style.

My main questions are these: Are you mainly using the (stock) source templates which came with Reunion--or are you instead mainly using custom ones you built yourself? If yes on the latter; did you assign GEDCOM tags to these? ..and most important; how are you recording City? Is Town/City a standalone field, or one field with other stuff to follow i.e. county, state, country etc.?

Whatever the case, we could wrangle this around relatively easily form Excel, I think, before importing the lot into Zotero.

Mark Is it possible forTeresa C to attain a spreadsheet or .csv of from a GEDCOM of her own database? All she'd need are her sources, one per row, with each source's various fields in a column. I presume most columns would be shared values based on GEDCOM tag such as TITL.

Teresa, the bad news is that I haven't a clue how to get a spreadsheet into Zotero. There are others who I think do know how to do this though. As but one recent example; I was keenly following a thread on the DEVONthink forum in May, in which username "lydondrake" skillfully did the reverse of what you want to do. (There's also an active Zotero-hosted online forum--with many experts there who know it's "back end.")

Happy to help nevertheless. I think what you need is relatively straightforward.

Ryan

[Teresa C]

Thanks so much, Ryan_N
To answer your questions - I mostly use templates that I've created myself, yes I assigned GEDCOM tags, and I don't use a standalone city field - I use a place field. I confess to not liking this aspect of how Reunion manages places....but over the years I've gotten used to it.
If there is a way to create a .csv file, that would be very helpful indeed. I'm not sure how to import in to Zotero either, but as you say - the Zotero online forum is full of very clever people :-)

Cheers,
Teresa

[Teresa C]

Hi again Ryan_N ,

You got me thinking - if I export a list of my sources in Word, the fields are all separated by a comma - so in theory I could simply use that to create a .csv by importing into Excel. Does that sound reasonable?

[Ryan_N]

Hi again Ryan_N ,

You got me thinking - if I export a list of my sources in Word, the fields are all separated by a comma - so in theory I could simply use that to create a .csv by importing into Excel. Does that sound reasonable?

MS Word, I think not, but I'm certainly not an expert. But now you got ME thinking: what might happen if you just copied a formatted citation that was generated from Reunion, i.e. in a Word doc, then do an "import from clipboard" in Zotero (with its mode set to Chicago 17)? I mean, it might magically convert some totally obscure citation based on an Evidence Explained model, into Chicago right on the spot. It is certainly set up to do that, and I've had beautiful success importing from clipboard--but never tried a nonstandardized format before (to see if it could convert).

[Teresa C]

Now that's an idea!!
I will give it a try and see what happens.....and let you know

[Ryan_N]

Excited to hear if that works!

Worst case scenario for you might be layered titles, i.e. a titled book chapter or journal article, and/or Reunion's place field.

If you want just the first word before the comma in your Place field, for example, this can surely be done somehow in Excel. You might need to do that for date, too, i.e. if you use 04 JUL 1776 as your format but only want the four-digit year to go to Zotero (but I'm 99% sure Zotero is smart enough to do the date one on its own). If you DO end up using Excel for tweaks, definitely convert your columns, after they look the way you want them to, into plain text--or otherwise remove whatever invisible formatting Excel placed on them, to assure they export as a .csv exactly as you see them on your screen. (I say this because I'm sure Excel could convert to a four-digit year while keeping month and day invisible for your date column. If it were me, I'd want the invisible values vaporized.).

[Mark]

Mark Is it possible forTeresa C to attain a spreadsheet or .csv of from a GEDCOM of her own database?

Not from Reunion, no -- at least not as far as I'm aware.

[Howard Fink]

I don't have any expertise with what you are trying to do with your sources, but something I immediately thought of to watch out for will be if commas exist within any of your citation fields you cannot plan to also use commas as a separator for your .csv file. If all the apps/steps support using a different delimiter you will be all set, but if any step in the process requires that the delimiter be a comma then I suspect you will run into a big problem.

[Teresa C]

Excited to hear if that works!

Ryan_N - no, didn't work . I get a message saying the file format is not accepted, which is odd as I'm trying to import from the clipboard.
I did manage to create a .csv file from my word document, but it's not obvious to me from Zotero how to import it.I'll jump on to the support forum for Zotero and see what I can find.
My other option would be try the same thing in EndNote.
Thanks everyone for helping me brainstorm on this one!

[Lawrence E Moore]

Wish list item: the ability to export any list as a tab-delimited file and a Numbers file and an Excel file.

[Derrick]

I second this wish list item: ability to export/import sources in a standard bibliographical format (I think standard ones are RIS and Endnote XM?L). I too have different sets of sources across Zotero and Reunion.