Aloha all, At the risk of introducing noise, I've long wondered if tex4ht might help with citation processing in Org mode? IIUC, tex4ht uses the device-independent dvi file produced by TeX to make html, odt, and other formats. With an Org mode that relied on tex4ht, users would use BibTeX bibliographies, and Org mode documents with citations would be processed by LaTeX and a tex4ht script that would yield the correctly formatted in-text citations and bibliography in the desired output format. Org mode would then parse this output and plug in the pieces at the right places.
This approach, if feasible, would please LaTeX users happy with BibTeX and wary of translating bibliographic databases to Zotero. It would only require a working LaTeX installation, and so would avoid the Haskell hassle, etc. And, it would make use of BibTex/BibLaTeX, arguably the best bibliography software out there. I'm in way over my head here and won't be surprised to learn that this idea is a bad one. Given the wide-ranging nature of this discussion, I thought this might be the time to suggest it. All the best, Tom -- Thomas S. Dye http://www.tsdye.com