Search restricted to articles that are cited by certain given articles

froy1009

Sorry if this question is obvious, I'm new to Zotero. Is there a function that allows me to tell Zotero “this article that I have saved in Zotero cites these other articles that I also have saved in Zotero” so that I can do a search restricted to articles cited by certain given articles or simply view the cited articles of certain given articles?

Something like a tag but automatic, so for example, there is a tag for each article, and I can assign that tag to every single article that article cites. Instead of manually creating a tag for each article, some feature that does the equivalent.

tim820

Accessing the data on the cited references in a paper has traditionally been difficult, because journal publishers did not often provide the reference lists when uploading basic paper metadata to the online databases that are used for retrieving paper metadata by Zotero (eg Crossref). An alternative is for software to reliably parse the reference list text in the paper PDFs - but that is not easy because there are so many different reference list formats.

However journal publishers are getting better at providing reference list data, and software reference list text parsers are getting better. The plugin below can use either method for extracting reference lists (although neither is perfect). It then does a good job (but again not perfect) of highlighting in bold which references you already have in your library. It can also take you to the URL for cited papers you don't have (usually via DOI lookup); so that you can download them via the Zotero Web Connector. All in all it's a pretty impressive feat given the difficulties.
https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference
(right-click Google Translate in Chrome does a good job of translating the instructions to English)

There is no *automated* way I can think of to restrict a search to a single paper's cited references.