Re: text to bibliographic markup up-conversion

James (and listserv), 

I haven’t implemented this kind of an approach, but my understanding is that this could be done in Python using Google Scholar to parse the bibliographic entry, and then use the Zotero API to convert the Google data to a Zotero citation object, which can then be exported in almost any standard citation format. If you want to open a Word or pdf document, you’ll need additional libraries such as pdfminer and python-docx. Of course, the document will also need to written in such a way that a common delimiter or regular expression can be used to separate one citation from the next. Something as simple as a newline marker should work. 

Here is an implementation that ends with BibTeX instead of Xotero: 
http://blog.macuyiko.com/post/2016/replacing-bibtex-references-with-dblp-entries-updated.html
 
I don’t know if this helpful. It sounds like Paul encountered lots of additional complications, although auto-detecting entries on a CV is also much more complicated than taking a list of only bibliographic entries and parsing it. The hardest part seems to be taking a plain text bibliography entry and parsing it into fields. The Google Scholar approach potentially has the benefit of returning a ranked list for each query, so you could do that part in one step, hand correct, and then send to Zotero, depending on the size of the bib. 

Cheers and good luck,

Matthew Lavin
Clinical Assistant Professor of English and Director of Digital Media Lab
University of Pittsburgh

On 1/4/17, 12:08 PM, "Paul Schaffner" <[email protected]> wrote:

    I don't have an answer James, but would like one too. 
    Years ago, I ran a pilot attempt to extract lists of faculty
    publications (taken from CVs) into a usable consistent format.
    What I discovered was that (1) there are as many formats
    as there are faculty members, more or less; (2) that much
    information in citations is so compact and abbreviated or assumed
    as to be very difficult even to interpret (by someone outside the
    field), much less extracted automatically; and (3) that what
    many humanists think of as citations, i.e. print publications in
    the form of books, chapters, or articles, represent the tip of
    an iceberg of different kinds of communications that get cited
    in lists of publications in fields like electrical engineering,
    genetics,
    and medicine (patents, video games, commentary, code,
    etc.)  I gave up on automatic extraction, concentrated on manual
    extraction, and even then, after five iterations of increasingly
    undemanding specs, despaired of being able to convert thousands
    of such citation lists accurately and inexpensively.
    
    Here is version 5, which may serve at least to suggest some
    of the different formats and problems likely to be encountered:
    https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http:%2F%2Fwww-personal.umich.edu%2F~pfs%2Fcvs%2Fspec_05.html&data=01%7C01%7Clavin%40PITT.EDU%7C5bedd4dedbcc45947cd108d434c457ab%7C9ef9f489e0a04eeb87cc3a526112fd0d%7C1&sdata=NZvxBuXgZL0%2FCUdBMrPrUrdthl9T%2FgpahicrL8Pmh%2BE%3D&reserved=0
    
    pfs
    
    ps I should say that I did not, in most cases, have access to
    a digital text of the source--many were image files wrapped
    in pdfs. So simple data capture was also an issue.
    
    On Wed, Jan 4, 2017, at 11:30, James Cummings wrote:
    > Hi all,
    > 
    > This isn't necessarily related to TEI per se (though there is no 
    > reason I couldn't use TEI as an intermediate format).  I'm 
    > looking into various ways to get printed & OCR'd or word document 
    > lists of bibliographic items into a more structured forms.  For 
    > example a plain text list of items into BibTeX format to then 
    > import into a system like Zotero or Endnote. The bibliographies 
    > in question have _not_ been created with any reference-manager 
    > software.
    > 
    > There are a number of tools suggested at 
    > https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zotero.org%2Fsupport%2Fkb%2Fimporting_formatted_bibliographies&data=01%7C01%7Clavin%40PITT.EDU%7C5bedd4dedbcc45947cd108d434c457ab%7C9ef9f489e0a04eeb87cc3a526112fd0d%7C1&sdata=ddR5d2yqY2aIDNHbevFrawNy7EKKyQfy3FIF34uuV4A%3D&reserved=0 
    > but some of these are only web-based. (Though a couple like 
    > FreeCite at Brown have an API.)  I definitely would prefer 
    > something that was scriptable and even better if there is already 
    > some nice commandline script for me to call per citation or long 
    > list of newline separated citations.
    > 
    > I don't mind if it goes direct to some popular bibliographic 
    > interchange format like BibTeX, or if it has another structured 
    > format (XML, TEI, csv, etc.) as an intermediary.
    > 
    > I figured some of you have probably done this kind of thing 
    > and/or have recommendations of existing tools that do this well.
    > 
    > -James
    > 
    > -- 
    > Dr James Cummings, Academic IT Services, University of Oxford, 
    > TEI Consultations: [email protected]
    -- 
    Paul Schaffner  Digital Library Production Service
    [email protected] | https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http:%2F%2Fwww.umich.edu%2F~pfs%2F&data=01%7C01%7Clavin%40PITT.EDU%7C5bedd4dedbcc45947cd108d434c457ab%7C9ef9f489e0a04eeb87cc3a526112fd0d%7C1&sdata=ZG0dOAZ5mab8fXhUCRw3XuKcKLqxRKw8YZpCTu993PA%3D&reserved=0