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I got this question from a reader: How to import an RIS or bib-export file from Zotero (Reference Manager) and convert the data into a bibliographic class. Zotero is open access and its export cannot be read as easy as a Clavariate-bib export file. Some fields are missing, such as ID (Key in Zotero export) or CI for citations. Zotero does not extract this information and I do not need it.

The good news is that I use Zotero daily, and to answer this I will use the sub-collection I created for the Kendall’s correlation coefficient article.

After exporting that sub-collection to Zotero RDF, RIS and BIB, I realised it is not very straightforward to read this into R and export to a Clarivate-BIB file, and I had to create my own functions but those ended up being a few hundred lines and I organized those as an R package.

The code and data for this example are available on GitHub.

Install the zotero R package with:

remotes::install_github("pachadotdev/zotero")

You can see the code on GitHub and improve the functions.

Read a Zotero exported file like so:

library(zotero)
x = read_zotero("bibliography.bib")
y = read_zotero("bibliography.rdf")
z = read_zotero("bibliography.ris")

The result is the same for each object:

names(z)

[1] "df"  "bib"

z$df

                                                                                                       title
1                                                    Buy Stata | Student single-user purchases (educational)
2                                                        Buy Stata | Student Lab new purchases (educational)
3                                                                 A Deep Dive Into How R Fits a Linear Model
...
                                                                   author year
1                                                              Stata Corp 2025
2                                                              Stata Corp 2025
3                                                           Matthew Drury 2016
...

z$bib

Corp S (2025). “Buy Stata | Student single-user purchases
(educational).” Stata Student single-user purchases,
<https://www.stata.com/order/new/edu/profplus/student-pricing/>.

Corp S (2025). “Buy Stata | Student Lab new purchases (educational).”
Educational single-user new purchases,
<https://www.stata.com/order/new/edu/lab-licenses/dl/>.

Drury M (2016). “A Deep Dive Into How R Fits a Linear Model.”
<https://madrury.github.io/jekyll/update/statistics/2016/07/20/lm-in-R.html>.
...

Export the result to a Clarivate-BIB file:

write_clarivate(z$bib, "export.bib")
@misc{student-pricing,
  title = {Buy Stata | Student single-user purchases (educational)},
  author = {Corp, Stata},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://www.stata.com/order/new/edu/profplus/student-pricing/},
  id = {student-pricing},
  citations = {},
  abstract = {Stata Student single-user purchases},
}

@misc{dl,
  title = {Buy Stata | Student Lab new purchases (educational)},
  author = {Corp, Stata},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://www.stata.com/order/new/edu/lab-licenses/dl/},
  id = {dl},
  citations = {},
  abstract = {Educational single-user new purchases},
}

@misc{lm-in-R_html,
  title = {A Deep Dive Into How R Fits a Linear Model},
  author = {Drury, Matthew},
  year = {2016},
  url = {https://madrury.github.io/jekyll/update/statistics/2016/07/20/lm-in-R.html},
  id = {lm-in-R_html},
  citations = {},
}
...

I hope this is useful 🙂 I added an optional email field in the form to notify when I answer the questions.