Wikidata:Zotero/Cita/Documentation

The quickstart guide and the recording of the presentation workshop are the only documentation available right now.

Cita presentation workshop recording

Further information may be scattered around in the proposal page and its discussion, in the Cita page discussion, in the source code repository's issue and discussion trackers, and (more cryptically) in the source code itself.

You can help with collaboratively writing the documentation here.

Cita Documentation

FAQ

Why is "Show Local Citation Network" disabled?

Showing a citation network only makes sense for two or more items. Make sure to select at least two items or a collection before clicking on "Show Local Citation Network". See here for further information.

How can I add one or more items in my library as citations to another item?

The option to add items as citations to another item is not yet supported (see here). However, since Cita v0.3.0 you can export one or more items to a file or to the clipboard and import them as citations.

To export items to a file:

1. select them,
2. right click on them, and
3. choose "Export items".

To export items to the clipboard:

1. select them,
2. press Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-C to use Zotero's Quick Copy.

To import items as citations to another item (Cita >v0.3.0):

1. select the citing item,
2. open the Citations tab,
3. click on More > Import citations,
4. either import citations from a file or from the clipboard.

How can I extract citations from a PDF attachment?

The option to automatically extract citations from PDF attachments is not yet supported (see here). However, since Cita v0.3.0 you can use a reference extraction service such as Scholarcy Reference Extraction API to get a reference list and import it as citations in Cita:

1. go to https://ref.scholarcy.com/api/,
2. click on "POST /references/download",
3. click on "Try it out",
4. click "Browse" to select your PDF file as "file" parameter,
5. click "Execute",
6. click "Download file" to get the list of extracted references,
7. in Zotero, select the citing item,
8. open the Citations tab,
9. click on More > Import citations,
10. import citations from the file you downloaded above.

You may also use a reference parsing service such as AnyStyle.io to manually paste the references (one per line) and get a BibTeX file.

How to fetch citations from Crossref?

Crossref provides open references for some of their records. Automatically fetching these references is not yet supported by Cita.

In the meantime, a possible workaround would be to manually get these references and import them into Cita. Unfortunately, the Crossref API doesn't seem to return references as a list of standard records. An alternative is to get a list of cited DOIs via OpenCitation's COCI (Crossref Open Citations Index), and paste them into Cita's "Add citation(s) by identifier":

1. In your web browser, go to https://w3id.org/oc/index/coci/api/v1/metadata/{doi}, where {doi} is the DOI of the citing item. For example, https://w3id.org/oc/index/coci/api/v1/metadata/10.1108/jd-12-2013-0166.
2. Copy the list of DOIs in the "reference" field.
3. Use a text editor to remove leading and trailing quotation marks and semicolons (DOIs should be separated by space only).
4. In Zotero, select the citing item and open the Citations tab.
5. Click on More > "Add citation(s) by identifier", paste the list of DOIs copied above, and hit "Add". It may take some time as it downloads references' metadata.

Note that OpenCitations' COCI does not reflect changes in Crossref immediately. The date of the last update and what Crossref dump it is based on is available here.

How to fetch citations from OpenCitations Corpus?

The OpenCitations Corpus (OCC) is an open repository of scholarly citation data. Cita supports adding OCC IDs to items in Zotero, but automatically fetching references from this repository is not yet supported.

In the meantime, a workaround is to get a list of cited DOIs from OCC API and paste them into Cita's "Add citation(s) by identifier. Just follow the steps in How to fetch citations from Crossref? above, but use https://w3id.org/oc/api/v1/metadata/{doi} instead of https://w3id.org/oc/index/coci/api/v1/metadata/{doi}.