How to delete zotero data

In case anyone wants to delete the bibliographic data stored on Zotero (the Zotero info doesn’t help at all, as far as I could tell), here is what I did. I had over 5,000 items on Zotero which I wanted to delete. The reason is that I much prefer Bibdesk because it is flexible, fast, convenient, and works well with Textmate, XeLaTeX, and/or TeXShop for processing and pdf production. I couldn’t find a “data delete” button on the Zotero web page. So, I launched the Zotero extension (“add-on”) in Firefox, highlighted all the references in the library with shift-click, dragged them to the trash (or used Delete, I’m not sure anymore), then clicked on Trash and repeated the operation. “Sync” wiped the data on Zotero. Took a little while. Then I removed the Zotero folder left on my machine (Mac: /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/random string/zotero) and whatever preference zotero files I had in /Library/Preferences. As for my Zotero account on the website, I removed it indirectly by deleting the email account associated with it. Cumbersome, but it worked.

2 thoughts on “How to delete zotero data”

  1. I do wonder in what way Zotero isn’t “true open”. All of Zotero’s code, including the server code, is open and AGPL licensed and Zotero follows all relevant standards.

    But yes, this is the way to delete your Zotero data.

  2. Not correct wording on my part, you are right. Having to spend quite some time finding how to delete my data as well as difficulties I had in the past with keys and meshing with Bibdesk made me add this word.

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