zotero: citationKey vs. shortTitle

[arlogriffiths]

@michaelnmmeyer — since version in 9.0 (April 10, 2026), Zotero has a new field "citationKey" (https://www.zotero.org/support/changelog). I notice that quite a lot of our entries, if not all of them, now show the value of shortTitle duplicated in "citationKey". Example:

Do you understand how this duplication could have happened?

I recall that our use of shortTitle was something of a hack. Do we have an interest in moving to use of citationKey?
If so, what steps would this require us to take?
If not, what (if anything) would it be useful to say about the field citatrionKey in the final Zotero Guide, that I am trying to get ready for release?

[danbalogh]

Similar thoughts have occurred to me too but I have no answer. Zotero added a number of new fields simultaneously and there was some silent automated migration done when these were introduced, so my guess is that this is how those citation key fields got populated.

[michaelnmmeyer]

I can't tell why the new column is sometimes filled.

This new column is apparently undocumented for now, and we have been using the short title system for a long time, so we should keep things like that until the end of dharma. The citation key column most likely performs uniqueness checks to prevent duplicate keys, but again, this is not documented, so we can't even tell whether we would gain anything from switching to it.

You should not talk about the citation key column in the Zotero guide. There is no reason to.

[arlogriffiths]

thanks for both responses. this is enough for me at this time.