Hi XWiki-Forum,
At my university we’re currently looking for a solution for collaboration and knowledge sharing and I’m somewhat advertising for XWiki, hoping that one day people will be writing their papers in XWiki instead of Word. However, one major thing that I haven’t found a satisfying solution for is easy adding of citations. This would probably be a deal breaker in the long run, as citation management is a critical feature in academia. It would be amazing to have an integration possibility with e.g. zotero that would allow me insert references from my zotero library or add references used on a XWiki page into my zotero library. The ideal case would be the possiblity to export a wiki-page to Word (even though I’d like to get rid of it) for final editing of an article, before sending it out to a scientific journal for peer-review. Importing a Word Document that already contains references added with Zotero (or Citavi, Mendeley, whatever) would also be a crucial step to get people’s writing efforts into the wiki.
The least thing that I would need to start with, is something like the citation possibilities in MediaWiki, as demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U14yWfAa4z4
Is there a plug-in that does that already, that I’m currently missing out on?
Looking forward to your replies
would be awesome I agree 
It’s relatively easy to extend xwiki to add extensions for things like this but first, in order to assert the easiness or not, I’d need to understand what “integration with zotero” would mean exactly. Could you elaborate for those like me who don’t know zotero?
So XWiki already supports exporting to word so that’s cool. One thing you should know also is that XWiki has a nice extension to export to LaTeX which you may like since scientific papers often use LaTeX.
See http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/LaTeX/
So XWiki also supports importing from word. However, to recognize citations and translate them to citation concepts in XWiki is not there by default but it should be possible to add custom filters (and if not possible right now it would be easy to add).
No there isn’t right now but here are some pointes to how this could be added to XWiki:
- We already have a
{{footnote}}(http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Footnote%20Macro) and{{putFootnotes}}(http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Put%20Footnotes%20Macro) macros - So one solution would be to use those macros to display citations. However this would mean no ways to manage citations if we want to do complex things with them (like reload them from their sources, etc).
- Thus another solution would be to implement a simple Citation Application providing an XClass to represent a citation. This would allow us to store citations in the wiki. Then we could imagine some new macros to insert a citation at a place in the content and to display all citations at the bottom of documents.
With this, users would be able to insert citations (even using the WYSIWYG editor) and display them at the bottom of documents.
Links:
Thanks
Zotero is a reference manager that allows me to manage the references I use. There are two things that are key for me in using any reference manager (Just putting zotero, because it’s open source).
- Collecting, managing and sharing (academic) references
I can have individual libraries, in which I store the refernces I use in my work, but I can also create shared libraries, to which several people have access.
Zotero has a plug-in for Firefox that allows me to save a resource from a website and it is able to extract the meta-data (for the most part), such as authors, year of publication, publisher, etc. and save it to my libraries (in BibTex format I think). All just with a click on a button. (adding_items_to_zotero [Zotero Documentation]) - Word-Processor Plug-in (In most cases MS Word)
word_processor_plugin_usage [Zotero Documentation]
This plug-in allows me with a click/or keyboard shortcut to open a little pop-up window (while still in the word-processor) that is connected to my library and lets me search it
I can also make adjustments, like adding the page, a prefix and other options and then add the reference to my document. What it does is entering a field with a function. When I right click and edit that field it shows a field function that looks like this for this particular reference:
ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"IfvaSJJ5","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(see Barth, 2016, p. 20)","plainCitation":"(see Barth, 2016, p. 20)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":2466,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/4663497/items/A7XRZZ4R"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/4663497/items/A7XRZZ4R"],"itemData":{"id":2466,"type":"chapter","title":"Teaching and learning in sustainability science","container-title":"Sustainability Science","publisher":"Springer","page":"325–333","author":[{"
What I would love to have for XWiki are two things:
- the possibility to have similar functionality in xwiki, that while editing in WYSIWYG-mode I can access my personal library and add/edit one of my resources
- Easily add a reference put by someone else into my personal library with just a click
There are two potential challenges I see.
- The different access rights and how to manage them (private library vs. shared library and making changes to each of them)
- When exporting from XWiki to Word (or importing), would it maintain the field function?
PS: LaTex is used by some scientific papers, but not as much by the broad scientific community (at least those around me)
If this function is already resolved today?
Not that I know of, but it wouldn’t be too hard to develop or to sponsor its development.
Three years have passed, and this problem still seems to have not been resolved. Do you need more knowledge about Zotero? I can provide some assistance.
It could easily become 10 or 20 years if nobody is willing to work to resolve it!
Thanks. However what is needed is someone willing to develop it. There’s no magic and nothing is free. There’s always someone that has to pay the cost!
So either you can develop it yourself (great! that would help the xwiki project) or you’ll need to convince someone else to do it for you (usually the best convincing is sponsoring the feature which is why I was mentioning that above).