As I noted before, I use both Zotero and Endnote to do my bibliography work. For works that I have pdfs of, I keep these in a folder on D: drive. I use the same pdfs for both my Zotero and Endnote bibliographies.
Zotero can export to Endnote via the RIS format, so all seems well. Naturally, I want to have the locations of the pdfs included in the export from Zotero. Naturally, I don’t want to have the pdfs included with the export. Just include the location, not the file, right?
Unfortunately, using Zotero out of the box, when you tell it leave off the pdfs and export, it leaves off everything about them; if you tell it to include the pdfs, well, I have over 20 gb of pdfs, and its a long process.
In this post, I described how to modify the RIS export function in Zotero, so that it exports the names and locations of the pdfs, but not the pdfs themselves. This method works, but there is a hitch that I got hit with the other day and I note it here for future reference.
My solution involved a one line edit to Zotero’s RIS.js file. The hitch is that RIS.js is automatically updated whenever Zotero is updated. This naturally wipes out the one line edit. The solution is–check the RIS.js file every time you want to export, to make sure the edit hasn’t been overwritten
I only found this out when I tried to export part of my Zotero library to an .ris file in c:\my docs. But my C: drive is now getting very short of space, thanks to Windows XP (6 gb) and Acrobat (3 gb). No matter, I still have 5 gb of free space.
Export begins, but why so slow? Yikes! It’s copying all my attachments to the C: drive. Can you tell Zotero to cancel? Nope. Can you turn off Firefox? Nope. How much room do all my attachments take up anyway? 6.5 gigabytes! 6.5 gigabytes!! (I sound like Doc Brown in Back to the Future.) Only one thing to do. Turn off computer. No, no, no, bad idea! Well then, just delete the files as they are copied to c drive–one at a time (press delete, enter, 3000 times).
Ha! ha! ha!—he! he! he!—a very good joke indeed—an excellent jest. We shall have many a rich laugh about it at the palazzo—he! he! he!—over our wine—he! he! he!