Tagging is an easy method of categorising or labelling your Zotero items by adding keywords. These tags allow you to filter your items in a variety of ways through the Tag Selector in the bottom left-hand corner of Zotero. A good way of identifying and easily locating your most important tags is to colour-code them. For instance, I have an orange tbr tag, which means ’to be read’ and a green borrow tag for books I need to retrieve from the library. ...
Although Zotero works smoothly with Word, not everyone wants to dedicate the best years of their life to Microsoft products. While Google Docs won’t necessarily bring you much more joy, at least it’s free and doesn’t occupy half your hard drive. In this post, I’ll explain how you can use Zotero to create citations and bibliographies in a Google Doc. To use Zotero with Google Docs, you need two elements: ...
As your Zotero Library grows, it’s important to maintain quality. If it’s messy, it’ll be harder to find what you need and also you’ll spend a lot of time fixing citations. Here are some tips for keeping everything tidy. Find Unfiled Items Zotero can filter your Unfiled Items. This shows you anything that doesn’t yet belong to a Collection, such as random articles you saved without a specific project in mind. ...
Although syncing your Zotero Library ensures you have a cloud-based backup, it’s also a good idea to schedule independent backups. Why am I giving you extra work to do? Well, if you accidentally delete a bunch of items in Zotero just before it syncs, your empty version is copied to the Zotero servers. This is a fairly unlikely scenario, but it’s not one you’d want to encounter. In this post, I’ll explain how to back up your Zotero Library, and then outline some methods for restoring your items in different scenarios. ...
One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is whether it’s possible for EndNote users to switch easily to Zotero. Yes, it is! Many of the tutorials focus on exporting your library in RIS format. Although straightforward, this method doesn’t retain your PDF attachments, Groups, or formatting. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the XML method. XML is a more sophisticated file format that’s readable by many tools. You need to follow the instructions precisely, but you’ll get a much better result. ...
I often meet researchers who are unhappy with their bibliographic referencing tool, but are put off by the potential faff. They imagine it would be as much fun as changing banks. Well, if you’re thinking of moving from Mendeley to Zotero, I have good news: it’s very easy. There are two main methods. Let’s look at them in turn. Method 1 - Export a RIS file from Mendeley A RIS file is a format that allows citation tools to exchange data. ...
In my previous post, I explained several options for managing your Zotero storage. If you’re willing to install a plugin, there’s another solution: Zotmoov. If you’ve been using Zotero for a while, you’ve probably heard of Zotfile, a popular plugin that allowed users to automatically organise PDFs and keep them synced through cloud storage. Unfortunately, Zotfile is no longer maintained and doesn’t work with Zotero 7. The good news is that Zotmoov offers some of the same features, while others are now a core part of Zotero 7. ...
If you’ve been merrily saving ebooks, journal articles, and web snapshots to Zotero, you might run out of storage space. There’s a limit to how much you can sync for free. In this post, I’ll explain how to check your storage limit, how to save storage space, and how to increase the space. The current limit is 300Mb, which usually equates to a few hundred PDFs. Once you’ve reached this threshold, you need to pay an annual subscription before you can sync any more data. You’ll see an exclamation mark next to your sync icon. ...
I’m a huge Zotero fangirl, but there’s one feature that really annoys me: automatic tags. You’re merrily adding articles, only to find that your Tag Selector is bulging with weird descriptors from databases and catalogues. It’s then hard to find the tags you carefully created for yourself. The good news is there’s a simple fix to remove those automatic tags and to prevent them from reappearing. Step 1 - Delete or hide the existing tags In the bottom right-hand corner of your Tag Selector, click the tiny funnel icon. In the pop-up window, uncheck Show Automatic. This hides all those database tags, displaying just those you created yourself. To remove them completely, click Delete Automatic Tags in This Library. Much better! 😅 ...
Around 10 years ago, I wrote a tutorial on using Zotero with Scrivener through the RTF/ODF plugin. This method was fiddly, but ultimately produced live Zotero citations in a Word or OpenOffice document. When Zotero 7 was launched, this method no longer worked. I updated my tutorial with a doom-laden reflection on why this problem was unlikely to be solved. Happily, the developers of the original plugin have not only updated it but also made it much better than the original. It’s now called ODF/DOCX Scan for Zotero. I’m grateful to Sebastian Karcher and the other volunteers for all their work and also to Professor Michael Cantinotti for alerting me to the update. ...