[memming]

I don't use Zotero any more, but from the receiving end, the BibTeX it exports is terrible. Lots of non-ascii chars, bizarre nested curly braces, wrong capitalization detection, etc. I dislike collaborating with colleagues who use Zotero because it takes so much time to clean up their BibTeX entries.

[dstillman]

Ask your colleagues to use the Better BibTeX plugin for Zotero, which includes vastly better support for BibTeX-based workflows.

Zotero's built-in BibTeX export is mostly intended as a generic data transfer format to other similar tools. It could surely be improved, and we'd be happy for patches, but contributions tend to go to Better BibTeX, since that's what people who care about BibTeX are using. (Zotero will export ASCII BibTeX if you choose "Western" instead of "Unicode" for the export charset, though.)

(Disclosure: Zotero developer)

[sytelus]

This. The paper I want to cite, I actually make an effort to go to its author's website and grab bib from there. That's the only definitive source of how the author wants to be cited. Grabbing bib from automated tools has created bib hell that we rely upon Google Scholar to clean up via fuzzy matching which screws up things quite often.

[retorquere]

That works if it's the author itself, and the author has at least a passing familiarity with BibTeX. Much of the bibtex that you can download from journal cites is itself pretty botched up.