Citation Keys

Standard Zotero BibTeX citations keys are fully auto-generated, using an algorithm that usually generates unique keys. For serious LaTeX users, "usually" presents the following problems:

• If a non-unique key is generated, which one gets postfixed with a distinguishing character is essentially non-deterministic.
• The keys are always auto-generated, so if you correct a typo in the author name or title, the key will change
• You can't see the citation keys until you export them

For a LaTeX author, the citation keys have their own meaning, fully separate from the other reference data, even if people usually pick a naming scheme related to them. As the citation key is the piece of data that connects your bibliography, this is a piece of data you want to have control over. BBT offers you this control:

• Set your own, fixed citation keys
• Stable citation keys, without key clashes. BBT generates citation keys that take into account other existing keys in your library in a deterministic way, regardless of what part of your library you export, or the order in which you do it.
• Generate citation keys from JabRef patterns

You can also

• Drag and drop LaTeX citations to your favorite LaTeX editor
• Show both pinned (fixed) citation keys and dynamically generated ones in the reference list view

Set your own, fixed citation keys

You can fix the citation key for a reference by adding the text "bibtex: [your citekey]" (sans quotes) anywhere in the "extra" field of the reference, or by using biblatexcitekey[my_key]. You can generate a fixed citation key by selecting references, right-clicking, and selecting "Generate BibTeX key".

Drag and drop/hotkey citations

You can drag and drop citations into your LaTeX/Markdown/Orgmode editor, and it will add a proper \cite{citekey}/[@citekey]/[[zotero://select...][@citekey]. The cite command is configurable for LaTeX by setting the config option in the Preferences. Do not include the leading backslash. This feature requires a one-time setup: go to Zotero preferences, tab Export, under Default Output Format, select "Better BibTeX Quick Copy", and choose the Quick Copy format under the Citation keys preferences for BBT.

Find duplicate keys through integration with Report Customizer

The plugin will generate BibTeX comments to show whether a key conflicts and with which entry. BBT integrates with Zotero: Report Customizer to display the BibTeX key plus any conflicts between them in the zotero report.

Configurable citekey generator

BBT also implements a new citekey generator for those entries that don't have one set explicitly; the formatter follows the JabRef key formatting syntax in the Better BibTeX preferences (you can get there via the Zotero preferences, or by clicking the Better BibTeX "Preferences" button in the addons pane.

A common pattern is [auth:lower][year], which means

1. last name of first author without spaces, in lowercase
2. year of publication if any,
3. a letter postfix in case of a clash (this part is always added, you can't disable it)

The default key pattern is [zotero], which implements the key generator of the standard Bib(La)TeX exporters (even though having underscores in your keys is not handled gracefully by all versions of LaTeX's bibliography processors) in order to ease migration from existing exports.

If you want to get fancy, you can set multiple patterns separated by a vertical bar, of which the first will be applied that yields a non-empty string. If all return a empty string, a random key will be generated. Note that in addition to the 'special' fields listed JabRef also allows all 'native' fields as key values; the plugin does the same but allows for Zotero native fields (case sensitive!) not Bib(La)TeX native fields. The possible fields are:

AbstractNote	AccessDate	ApplicationNumber	Archive
ArchiveLocation	ArtworkMedium	ArtworkSize	Assignee
Attachments	AudioFileType	AudioRecordingFormat	BillNumber
BlogTitle	BookTitle	CallNumber	CaseName
Code	CodeNumber	CodePages	CodeVolume
Committee	Company	ConferenceName	Country
Court	Date	DateAdded	DateDecided
DateEnacted	DateModified	DictionaryTitle	Distributor
DocketNumber	DocumentNumber	DOI	Edition
EncyclopediaTitle	EpisodeNumber	Extra	FilingDate
FirstPage	ForumTitle	Genre	History
Institution	InterviewMedium	ISBN	ISSN
Issue	IssueDate	IssuingAuthority	ItemType
JournalAbbreviation	Label	Language	LegalStatus
LegislativeBody	LetterType	LibraryCatalog	ManuscriptType
MapType	Medium	MeetingName	Month
NameOfAct	Network	Notes	Number
NumberOfVolumes	NumPages	Pages	PatentNumber
Place	PostType	PresentationType	PriorityNumbers
ProceedingsTitle	ProgrammingLanguage	ProgramTitle	PublicationTitle
PublicLawNumber	Publisher	References	Related
Reporter	ReporterVolume	ReportNumber	ReportType
Rights	RunningTime	Scale	Section
Series	SeriesNumber	SeriesText	SeriesTitle
Session	ShortTitle	Source	Studio
Subject	System	Tags	ThesisType
Title	University	Url	Version
VideoRecordingFormat	Volume	WebsiteTitle	WebsiteType

Advanced usage

BBT adds a few fields, flags and filter functions that JabRef (perhaps wisely) doesn't. These are:

Functions

• auth, authIni, edtr, ... and all the author-related fields that mimic the JabRef equivalents also have capitalized versions (so Auth, AuthIni, Edtr, ...) which follow the same algorithm but do not have any cleaning (diacritic folding, space removal, stripping of invalid citekey characters) applied. These can be used to pass through the filters specified below much like the fields from the table above. See also "usage note" below.
• journal: returns the journal abbreviation, or, if not found, the journal title, If 'automatic journal abbreviation' is enabled in the BBT settings, it will use the same abbreviation filter Zotero uses in the wordprocessor integration. You might want to use the abbr filter (see below) on this.
• 0: a pseudo-function that sets the citekey disambiguation postfix to numeric (-1, -2, etc, like the standard Zotero Bib(La)TeX translators do) rather than alphabetic (a, b, c). Does not add any text to the citekey otherwise.

Flags

• +initials adds initials to any author name function. Specify using e.g. [auth+initials]

Filters

• nopunct: removes punctuation
• condense: this replaces spaces in the value passed in. You can specify what to replace it with by adding it as a parameter, e.g condense,_ will replace spaces with underscores. Parameters should not contain spaces unless you want the spaces in the value passed in to be replaced with those spaces in the parameter
• skipwords: filters out common words like 'of', 'the', ... the list of words can be seen and changed by going into about:config under the key extensions.zotero.translators.better-bibtex.skipWords as a comma-separated, case-insensitive list of words. If you want to strip words like 'Jr.' from names, you could use something like [auth:nopunct:skipwords:fold] after adding jr to the skipWords list. Note that this filter is always applied if you use title (which is different from Title) or shorttitle.
• select: selects words from the value passed in. The format is select,start,number (1-based), so select,1,4 would select the first four words. It is important to note that `select' works only on values that have the words separated by whitespace, so the caveat below applies.
• ascii: removes all non-ascii characters
• fold: tries to replace diacritics with ascii look-alikes. Removes non-ascii characters it cannot match
• alphanum: clears out everything but unicode alphanumeric characters (unicode character classes L and N)
• capitalize: uppercases the first letter of each word
• postfix: postfixes with its parameter, so postfix,_ will add an underscore to the end if, and only if, the value it is supposed to postfix isn't empty
• prefix: prefixes with its parameter, so prefix,_ will add an underscore to the front if, and only if, the value it is supposed to prefix isn't empty. If you want to use a reserved character (such as : or \), you'll need to add a backslash (\) in front of it.

Usage note: the functions condense, skipwords, capitalize and select rely on whitespaces for word handling. The JabRef functions strip whitespace and thereby make these filter functions sort of useless. You will in general want to use the fields from the table above, which give you the values from Zotero without any changes.

Generation of stable keys, and syncing

Better BibTeX versions after 0.6.8 generate stable citation keys across your entire library. These stable keys come in two flavors:

1. 'soft' keys, which auto-update whenever the relevant data from the reference does, and
2. 'pinned' or 'fixed' keys, which don't.

The pinned keys show up in the 'extra' field of your references, and sync across libraries. The citation key is shown in the details pane of the reference, and in the extra column of the references list if you have enabled it in the BBT preferences. In the details pane, soft keys are displayed in italics; in the references list, soft keys have an asterisk after the key. The soft keys do not sync, but they're present in a separate database so partial exports will know to generate keys not already in use (even if that is a 'soft' use), and so these soft keys will reliably survive restarts of Zotero.

Quite a bit of trickery is involved in generating these stable keys, and some of this trickery could cause an undue burden on the Zotero sync infrastructure. To prevent such strain on the Zotero sync servers, the following restrictions are in place:

• By default, BBT only generates soft keys. You can generate a pinned key by right-clicking the reference and choosing 'Generate BibTeX key'. You can clear this key either by editing the extra field, or right-clicking the reference and selecting 'clear BibTeX key'. Clearing will immediately generate a fresh soft key.
• If you want to make sure all your exported BibTeX files have pinned keys (very useful if you have a shared library, or you work from multiple workstations), go into the BBT preferences and select 'on export'. This option will be greyed out unless you have Zotero sync off, or, if enabled, have set it to auto-sync. Each pinned key change (or clearing of a pinned key) means a change to the reference, and that means the item will be synced if you have that set up. Massive amounts of key changes (which can easily happen if you have on-export and you export your full library) could overwhelm the Zotero sync service if presented in sudden bulk; automatic syncing ameliorates that problem. I'm working on a change so you can make this a per-library setting, and a change that syncs citekeys outside the Zotero servers.
• If you always want pinned keys, go into the BBT preferences and select 'on change'. Mind that creation of a new reference counts as a change, and thus any new reference created (e.g. through import by any means) will immediately get a fixed key set which will not respond to subsequent edits of the reference.

I am terribly sorry having to do this, but not doing this would risk sync being permanently impossible, as the Zotero server will kick you out if a sync takes too long.