Bibliographic/Hints and Tips

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How do I preserve my Bibliographic Table format settings ?

When you done all that hard work in setting up the bibliographic table with all the field entries and formatting it to your document style, I suggest that you select and copy the Bibliographic table and save it in a other document.

The reason I suggest this is that, if you accidentally delete the Bibliographic Table, then all your work in formatting the table will be deleted too. To use your Bibliographic Table formatting in an other document, just copy that table into new document, it does not matter that the references are different, just right click over the table and select 'Update Index/Table' for it to be regenerated with that documents' citations and your previously defined Bibliographic Table format.

I edit my citations but the changes are not applied.

When you modify a citation (Bibliography Entry) by double-clicking on the citation, and selecting edit and modifying the entry. You also need to click on the 'Modify' button to apply the changes before you select the 'Close' button.

How do I correct the citations in my document?

If you have inserted a citation (Bibliography Entry) may times in a document and need to correct it. Correcting it in the database is not enough. The changes are NOT automatically made in the document. In fact each citation has complete copy of the citation data and must be correct for each citation. You have several options:

1. Find each citation, delete it and reinsert it (after correcting it in the database).

2. Find each citation, double-clicking on the citation, select edit, make the corrections, close the edit panel, click the 'Modify' button to apply the changes before you select 'Close'.

3. If you have too many citations to change in this way then you can edit the save file. Make a backup of your file. Rename your xxx.odt file xxx.zip, open the zip archive and extract the contents.xml file, open that file in a writer. Very carefully do a global find and replace for your corrections. Save the contents.xml back into the zip archive. Rename xxx.zip xxx.odt. Hoping you have not destroyed your file, open it and check.

Having your bibliography index automatically numbered

To use numbered references like e.g. [1], which is common for scientific documents, you can change the formatting of the reference anchors / entries in the document by setting "Number entries" under Insert->Index and Tables->Index/Table. Your actual generated bibliography however will not be automatically numbered just by checking this field. This also cannot be activated in the "Entries" dialog (while the idea of inserting the "Number" Type in front of an entry looks tempting, this will not yield the correct result). Instead, you have to activate numbering on the corresponding bibliography style. In most cases this will be "Bibliography 1". Activate "Numbering" on the Paragraph Style pane.

How can I import or export Bibliographic data?

The Openoffice bibliographic facility does not provide import/export filters yet. However there is an add-on bibtex import filter available. If you need to convert other bibliographic formats bibutils may help.

If you can download/export RIS (reference manager) format references from your datasource, then the utility RISmport.py may work better than a bibtext utility. It is a Python script for importing RIS format reference(s), RISmport.py. Possibly of some value as it hashes out some RIS details on mapping between fields, and suggests "sensitive" mapping for different reference types."

If this is not suitable then an option is to use a third-party bibliographic application that will export to an OpenOffice Bibliographic database in the text bibliographic database CSV format. (Openoffice looks for a database called Bibliography with the correct fields - it does not care what type of database it is.) I have used Jabref and B3. Bibus is another possibility. David Wilson

How can I Join multiple references?

Is there any (automatic) way to coalesce multiple bibliographic references onto a single one? I mean, something like [1-3,56,99] instead of [1][2][3][56][99]. As far as I have seen, there is no option in OOo to do that.CP 19:40, 22 May 2006 (CEST)

Answer Yes, but not as automatically as you may like. There is an option in Inset->Indexes and Tables->Indexes and Tables:Type=Bibliography an option under the heading 'Formatting the entries' a pick-list for 'Brackets'. You can select NONE.

If you select Brackets=NONE then [1][2][3][56][99] becomes 1 2 3 56 99 and you can then manually insert the brackets and the commas to get the desired [1,2,3,56,99]. However there is currently no automatic support for specifying a range of citations like [1-3]. The problem is that if you manually deleted the citation 2 and put in a dash, the citation 2 may disappear from the Bibliography list if there are no other references to it. However, you could place citation 2 in a 'Hidden Paragraph' to ensure it stays in the Bibliography list for that document. See some instructions on Hidden Paragraphs. David Wilson

Converting footnotes to endnotes

It is easy to convert footnotes on the same page to endnotes at the end of the document by changing the 'Position' option on the Tools->Foot notes..->Tab=Footnotes panel.

However, if you do this, there is some good advice from Judith Butcher, Copy-Editing, The Cambridge Handbook, (Cambridge: CUP, 1975)-

"More information may have to be given in the notes now that they will not appear on the same page as the relevant text. A book title and a page number - or just a publication place and date - may be sufficient in a footnote if the other details are mentioned in the text; but it is irritating to have to keep checking back to the text from the endnotes if one is looking through the notes for a book mentioned earlier." p156

How to load Zotero reference data into Openoffice.

zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

• Install RISmport.py which reads RIS format files containing one or more references and inserts them into the default OpenOffice.org Bibliography/'biblio' database. (install it in the /openoffice.org2.0/program/ directory)
• Select the Zotero titles you want to export to the OOo database
• Select Tools->’Export Library’ (from the gear icon), select Format=RIS and save the temp.ris file.
• Start OpenOffice.org
• Import the RIS data using RISmport.py, with a command like:

cd /openoffice.org2.0/program/python.sh  RISmport.py /your-path-to/temp.ris

• The reference details should now be in the default bibliographic database.

How to use Zotero to format your OOo Bibliography

• install writer2latex041 into OOo to export bibliographic data from the current document, not the database, in BibteX format. (Instructions on the web site).
• Open a OOo document with citations.
• Export your document bibliography data using: File->Export->File type='BibTex Data (.bib)' (i.e. temp.bib)
• In Zotero create a new Collection folder and select it.
• In Zotero import your temp.bib file by using the gear icon and Tools->Import.
• select all the titles you want to export, right-click and select 'Create Bibliography from Selected Items' from the context menu.
• Select the citation Style and 'Copy to Clipboard'
• Paste bibliography text into OOo page.
• Voila !

Note: in my test the 'Chicago Manual of Style (Note)' - a numbered reference list was not in the correct citation order.

Your question is not answered here ?

Try the Bibliographic FAQ

I feel I am going around in circles and I can not find what I need.

You could post add a question to this page or send a question to the Bibliographic Project user's mail list at users@bibliographic.openoffice.org

You are invited to add more Hints and Tips

Add a FAQ here or just ask a question on the discussion page. David Wilson