Question as in subject line.
Importing files of those formats used by academics, librarians to Writer built-in bibliography DB.
Motivation/trigger:
Zotero along with Writer master documents seems to be poorly managed by both teams - last feedback reads: maturity level is unknown.
see also ajlittoz’s and eighty2’s comments in Writers Guide: Bibliography section partial review
It depends on what you mean by “importing”.
Zotero/Writer are managed by independent teams.
LO tries to offer maximum flexibility to its users and they have a lot of work to fix known bugs on existing functionality. So, let’s not scatter their effort by requesting new features.
Zotero is not linked to any office suite and this is were the product has a weakness. In order for it to be “universal”, it does not use native features when it comes to insert a citation (because Zotero does not handle only bibliography entries). It uses macros to generate the insertions, formatting them with direct formatting (because it is available in all suites), letting the suite transform this into native encoding. This means you don’t control the look with styles (and they are ineffective because direct formatting takes precedence). If you add your own direct formatting over Zotero, on next macros activation it will be replaced by Zotero one.
I think both products are mature but the purposes are different and integration very difficult without sacrificing some of the objectives, notably “universality” or portability.
Thanks for feedback.
It is not the intention to exercise influence onto development decisions. Rather I use it as my search driver. Maturation level of integration Zotero to LO is here in mind. Users seem to be forced to search for workarounds/alternative resolutions due to experience made in past or/and current status-quo. Building blocks are available but usage in presented context apparently rare, no clear positive signals in community feedback (again, as far as it concerns presented context).
My usage of bibliography is rather basic. So for what I need, built-in biblio feature is enough.
I have not needed to use a referencing system for many years now but used to use JabRef with LO. It worked well and I see it will import from a variety of file types, including BibTex. You have to link JabRef to an already running instance of LO but once done you can cite references at the cursor (in LO) from the JabRef instance.
I will try this. Like OP, this is a really important feature for me. To be able to import bibtex entries is essential to my serious use of LO.