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I am trying to develop a workflow as I begin writing my dissertation (in the social sciences). I am using emcas as my LaTeX editor, Zotero as my citation manager, and Linux Mint as OS. I had a question of a simple workflow to allow me to add citations from Zotero. I know one way is to export a bib file from Zotero and use that in my .tex file. But the problem with this workflow is that it requires exporting a bib file each time I make an addition to citations. Is there better emacs+zotero+biblatex integration?

Francis
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    Have a look at this. I don't think, however, that you can get away with not exporting to a .bib file if you added a new reference. There is no way LaTeX/biblatex/Biber are able to know about it, if it is not in the .bib file. (See also this) – moewe Feb 28 '15 at 14:54
  • I was not thinking there would be a way to avoid exporting the .bib file, but was hoping there might be a zotero add-on that might modify the .bib file as citations were added as one made citations while writing in emacs. – Francis Feb 28 '15 at 19:23
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    In the last link someone advertises their zetoro add-on that does auto-exporting of a .bib file, maybe that is worth looking at. I'm not sure if there is a way for zotero to know you cited using emacs and it might be a good idea to export the .bib if something new came along. – moewe Feb 28 '15 at 19:45
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    That's correct, I don't think there's a great way for Zotero to keep track of which items you've cited in a particular document, so full export is probably best. I'm pretty sure this: https://github.com/ZotPlus/zotero-better-bibtex is by far the most complete Zotero-->bib(la)tex solution, allowing for both a lot of automation (like pull export, which won't slow down Zotero) and a lot of customization. Very responsive dev, too. – adam.smith Mar 01 '15 at 06:11
  • I have tried the workflow yet, but from the links above one option seems to be to use both the zotero auto-export extension and the better-bib(la)tex extension to automatically update my entire database as a .bib file when changes are made. -- Is there a way for auto-completion of citations in emacs linked through the .bib file? – Francis Mar 01 '15 at 19:35
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    I'm not sure about auto-completion in Emacs, but these tow links seem to suggest something is possible Setting up RefTeX Tab completion in emacs and Autocomplete Pandoc-style citations from a Bibtex file in Emacs, RefTeX Manual and Autocompleting \cite{} with emacs + auctex gives “cite: no such database entry”. What you need to keep in mind then is that this only works if the .bib file is up to date. – moewe Mar 02 '15 at 06:05
  • Do you have any inkling of what you would like an answer to this question to look like? Could you maybe answer the question yourself? – moewe Apr 05 '15 at 08:30

2 Answers2

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Better BibTeX for Zotero allows for automated export to BibTeX/BibLaTeX (a.o.). It's set-and-forget; you export a collection to a file, tick "Keep updated", and Bob's your proverbial uncle. Any changes you make to that collection or its entries will cause a background update of the bib file.

You can have multiple of such exports set up -- BBT implements heavy caching, so most of the time you won't even notice that its busy (except that one user with a crazy 22k entries in a single collection -- that takes a little under a minute).

Full disclosure: I am the author of BBT.

retorquere
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Zotelo is an emacs package to synchronize your collections from emacs.

https://github.com/vspinu/zotelo

fhllw
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