Custom citation keys in programs like Zotero or Mendeley

Question

I am looking for an advice.

I am trying to find "the best" (:>) program to manage my bibtex library which would let me create subgroups and format citation keys my way, e.g. ref:[author][year][a-z]; e.g. ref: followed by author, followed by year, followed by letters a, b, c if there are key duplicates.

First was JabRef. It would be ok but I work on CentOS and unfortunately JabRef does not work well on this system.

I tried KBibTeX which is fine but it a slightly too simple. Formatting citation keys is OK but it does not handle duplicates. I had to add first letters of title to the keys: ref:authorYearFLOT (First Letters of Title). If the title is long than the key gets quite long as well. The other problem is no groups and subgroups management.

Zetero has group managing, cloud syncing but bibliography has to be manually exported to bibtex file. It also has inconvenient citation keys formatting "author_year_firstwordoftitle". It handles the duplicates somehow but it is not the way I would like it. I would prefer to have "ref:" prefix in my key citations.

Mendeley has option to handle BibTeX by syncing separate folders into separate *.bib files, which is good. If there is a missing citation key, it provides it using "AuthorYear[abc...]" format but sometimes it gives something else like "Author:VMM1998475:word1:word2". I could not find how to edit a style that citation keys would follow.

Is there any add-on for Mendeley to handle custom citations?

Thanks for any advises.

EDIT. Even though Mendeley can sync references (in my case folders) with bibtex files, I still don't know when exactly they are synced. As I found a workaround with Zotero (see my answer), I am going to switch to this program. Currently, references have to be exported manually but at least I control it!

Answer 1

You can do all this by using Zotero with the Better BibTeX plugin -- the pre-release is stable, it's just not feature-complete. But the things you describe are ready, and doesn't require manually editing translator files which may be reset when Zotero updates them.

Answer 2

OK. I hope my workaround qualifies to be an answer.

I have fiddled a little bit with Zotero and I found out we can provide our own translators. They are written in JavaScript which I know a little. Because I cannot make my own Export Translator, I have changed the one that already exists: BibTeX by Simon Kornblith, Richard Karnesky and Emiliano heyns, v. 2.1.9 when I type this.

In BiBteX.js which handles exporting to *.bib, there is a following line:

var citeKeyFormat = "%a_%t_%y";

which is a placeholder for the citation key, in this format smith_firstword_2017. I changed the line to the following one:

var citeKeyFormat = "ref:%a%y";

which exports citationkey to something like ref:smith2017.

There is a function buildCiteKey (item,citekeys) which checks for duplicates and adds a suffix like -1, -2, etc. to the citation key. The result is following:

smith_firstword_2017
smith_firstword_2017-1
smith_firstword_2017-2
...

I did not like it, either. I decided to convert numbers the original script generates into a sequence of letters, e.g. a, b, ..., z, aa, ab, ... az etc. I found a code which does it for me here (beware the code under the ink generates error because of a comment line - # should be changed to //):

function convertToNumberingScheme(number) {
  var baseChar = ("a").charCodeAt(0);
  letters  = "";
  do {
    number -= 1;
    letters = String.fromCharCode(baseChar + (number % 26)) + letters;
    number = (number / 26) >> 0;
  } while(number > 0);

  return letters;
}

I inserted the function right after JSON sequence (the very top of the script) and changed the line:

citekey = basekey + "-" + i;

into

citekey = basekey + convertToNumberingScheme(i);

Now, the script generates cite keys according to my format:

smith2017
smith2017a
smith2017b
...
smith2017aa

Hope this answer can help others to make their own formats. I guess some people would prefer to keep the first word of titles. I think then one needs to keep %t placeholder in the variable: citeKeyFormat.