Better BibTex adds a couple of export formats to Zotero’s export dialog and several ways to improve export for plaintext-based authoring. The Better BibTeX configuration pane can be found under the regular Zotero preferences pane, tab ‘Better BibTeX’ where you can tweak the exports, such as

Additionally you can automate exporting (parts of) your library either using auto-export or pull export.

Pinning (fixing) the citation key

By default, BBT will generate citation keys from your items using the formatting pattern you specified. If you want the key to be stable even when you change the item, you can fix its citation key to a value of your choosing by adding the text Citation Key: [your citekey] on a line of its own in the extra field of the item.

Add your own BibLaTeX fields

LaTeX fields

You can add your own fields to the export which are not derived from regular Zotero item fields by adding them in the extra field:

either by using lines such as

tex.origdate= 1856
tex.origtitle= All This & More

or

tex.origdate: 1856
tex.origtitle: All This & More

The difference between lines with an = or an : is that the fields marked with = are considered to be valid (“raw”) latex and will be passed on into the generated files as-is. The lines marked with : are assumed to be plain-text and LaTeX special characters (such as the & above) will be escaped.

CSL fields

The final way to add fields is by using CSL fields in the format {:original-date: 1856} or Original Date: 1856 on a line of its own. These fields will not only be exported to Bib(La)TeX, but will also be picked up by the Zotero Bibliography manager, even though not all Zotero styles yet support this.

Note that the default biblatex styles do not seem to support origdate; you can find possible solutions for this at Stack Exchange here and here.

Changing the exported entry type

If you add a field called tex.entrytype, the value of that field value will be used as the entry type instead of the one usually inferred from the Zotero item type. You can use this to create, for example, @customa{citekeyhere, ....} type entries.

Background exports

To help out with larger libraries, BBT will export using an isolated thread (“worker thread”), which will prevent Zotero from locking up during exports. This was introduced in 5.2.0; at time of writing it passes all tests, and feedback so far has been positive, but it’s a wild departure from how Zotero exports work, so I consider it experimental at this stage. If you are experiencing errors,

  • please do report them, and
  • you can (temporarily I hope) disable by going into the BBT advanced preferences and drag the parallel exports slider to 0.

If BBT detects an error during background exports, it will disabled them, so that subsequent exports will be foreground exports. You can re-enable them using the same slider by dragging it back to the default 1.