I have bibliographies in Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, and other text files. Can I import them into my Zotero collection?
No. Zotero cannot currently import items from bibliographies in text documents. While this may sound like a simple request, it is actually rather difficult to accomplish given the range of potential formats.
If you have these references in a bibliographic database, export them to an intermediate format, such as RIS or BibTeX, and then import the references into Zotero. Alternatively, you can use third party tools to extract bibliographic data from formatted bibliographies:
- cb2Bib is a tool that will take formatted references copied to the clipboard and attempt to parse the individual bibliography fields into the BibTeX format, which you can then import into Zotero.
- Simple Text Query, a tool by CrossRef, tries to find the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) of the journal articles, books or chapters cited in a bibliography. The work flow here would be to paste the bibliography in the text box on this website, check out the resulting DOIs to see if the references have been correctly identified and then import these references from the publisher's websites into Zotero.
Otherwise, your best option is to either manually enter the references or find them online in a repository that Zotero supports.
See the related forum threads for further discussion of the difficulty of the problem as well as some success stories with cb2Bib.