Home › Use Your Libraries › Manage Bibliography & Citations › Zotero › Migrating Bibliographic Data from RefWorks to Zotero ›

Migrating Bibliographic Data from RefWorks to Zotero

in

 

  1. Download and install Zotero from www.zotero.org. Zotero lives inside your Mozilla Browser, and you must have the status bar (under VIEW) activated to see its icon in the bottom right-hand corner. Clicking on the icon will open the program.
  2. In your RefWorks account, go to REFERENCES > EXPORT
  3. Select 'All references'
  4. Select BIBTEX format, and click 'EXPORT'. Your references should appear in a new browser window or tab. If not, make sure that popup windows are not blocked.
  5. Copy and paste the text into a .txt file, and save. Choose UTF-8 as the encoding if you have any non-English references in your list.
  6. Back in ZOTERO, click on the little gear icon (ACTIONS) at the top > Import
  7. Select the text file you created earlier; your database will be imported to the default folder in ZOTERO.

... this may sound complicated, but it's quite easy, really. The only tricky thing is the creation of a text file as an intermediary step. All in all, it takes two minutes to export 800+ references from RefWorks account to Zotero — so it's much more efficient than re-tagging everything by hand.