Can I produce citations directly from Tropy

Hello,

I’m wondering if it’s possible to create citations directly from Tropy onto a text editor. Let’s say I want to cite a given item from Tropy and I don’t want to manually copy the reference. Is there a way to export the item to the clipboard just like Zotero does with bibliographic references?

Thanks in advance, I browsed through the forums to find the answer but I didn’t.

Santiago

Anyone ? Thanks :slight_smile:

Hey,

I see that in the documentation :

“Tropy is not a citation manager (e.g., Zotero). It does not capture metadata from online catalogs or finding aids. It does not generate citations for use in word-processing software.”

It seems the software is not design to do so.

Best regards,
Baptiste

Seems clear enough, thank you!

@inukshuk Are there any plans to develop this feature for future releases ?

There are currently no plans to generate citations directly in Tropy.

However, we have already developed a plugin to export Tropy items to Zotero (it’s not released yet, because we still need to tweak the configuration options). This plugin converts Tropy items to CSL-JSON first, which Zotero can import. It would be possible to adjust this plugin (or create a similar one) which feeds this CSL-JSON straight to citeproc-js (used by Zotero to generate citations) – that’s an option we have not really considered so far.

That said, obviously we’d like you to use both Zotero and Tropy! Is there any reason why you would like to generate citations straight from Tropy, or rather, any reason why it wouldn’t make sense to manage those items in Zotero?

I will be happy to manage those items in Zotero if there’s a plugin that allows to export them from Tropy with ease.

Do you have any idea of the release date of this plugin?

The plugin itself is almost ready for use, if you would like to experiment with it. Mainly, what it does is to map metadata fields to CSL-JSON fields. To make this work for you, you would likely have to adjust the template we use for conversion or create your own template in the template editor.

If you don’t want to experiment with this yourself, you can also help us by showing us some Tropy items and what corresponding item you would like to get in Zotero.

I’m not sure if I understand what you mean by “showing us some Tropy items and what corresponding item you would like to get in Zotero”.

To give you an idea of what I mean: I recently installed Zotpick in order to insert Zotero citations into a LaTeX editor as shown in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJWmtH2fZLk

So instead of going to Zotero to look for the citekey, I can insert the reference without leaving the text editor window. In the case of Tropy that would mean generating a reference directly on the text editor without leaving the window (e.g. “Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Box 3, Folder 4”). Obviously I know we’re still a long way from having an equivalent of Zotpick for Tropy, but anything that gets near would already be a big step.

I hope that’s clear enough.