composing from Zotero

mthc

I am a new user, just learning Zotero. However, I am looking for insights into two questions:

1. I have a backlog of notecards, with notes taken from books, articles, etc. Of course, I can type these into the database manually, but how does one link them to their bibliographic source?

2. What is the most efficient way of composing text from zotero. When composing from traditional notecards, I used to organize them by pinning them to a wall, reorganizing them according to topic. I then simply pulled down the cards and write from them. But, how about techniques specific to Zotero?

noksagt

Of course, I can type these into the database manually, but how does one link them to their bibliographic source?

Some find it more efficient to locate the article online & scrape it. If you do enter info manually, you can press the "locate" link. Depending on your OpenURL resolver, it will find a link to the online record.

What is the most efficient way of composing text from zotero.

You can do something somewhat analagous to what you do on paper, as you can make multiple notes & organize them however you choose. It might be prudent to put a good summary as the first line of the note, so that you can easily organize them.

scot

You link notes to their bibliographic source by making them children of that source. Add the note from the 'notes' tab of the source, or drag them onto the source's database listing. What you can't to is create an automatic link from part of your note text to a specific resource: "Adams results here invite comparison with those of |X| and |Y|. It's unfortunately that he doesn't seem to have read |Z|." It would be nice if there were a way to compose notes in Zotero which you could easily slot into your writing, references and all, but I suppose this will be some time coming, since it presupposes links within notes and probably note-text markup of some kind.

As noksagt says, searching in Zotero is excellent. You can assign free-standing notes to tags or collections, (child notes can only be only be assigned to tags at the moment, but this will change) and get access to the relevant set with a single click. Watch the instructional videos for a demonstration. Complex searching (items with tags X and Y published after 1990 and not in collection Z) is also possible. You can save such searches, which make them function as dynamic collections. This is very very slick. You can also specify that your note is 'related' to any item in your Library, which associates the note as a whole with the item.

You can export or create a "report" from such a set, creating a nice looking HTML document containing all your notes.

But what doesn't work so well is sorting and manual organization of such notes. You can't take your nice set of found notes and sift them into the order you want to *write* from. Nor can you see more than one note onscreen at once, except via a report, and in that case you can't edit or arrange them. You can save the report as an HTML doc and open it in Word or OOo, where you can rearrange it (e.g. using Word's outline mode) and write from that. This ought to work well (I just tried it). And is probably the best solution for manual note organization at this point. Of course it's not efficient if you have 5 or 10 notes for each of 30 ideas you want to write on. (You would have to have that many tags or collections or saved searches and either make that many reports or make one huge unordered report and order all the notes manually.) That would be my situation: a high density of notes to final written product. So I haven't taken the leap into keeping them in Zotero yet, since it would take a lot of manual work to get them in shape to write from. There appear to be people who are happily using Zotero's notes, however, and they may have better ideas ideas about these things than I do.

Lastly you can just print out a subset of your notes out and "go manual" with scissors, tape, and tacks but of course that leaves you where you are now. Also, at the moment, there is only a single report format, which is not customizable within Zotero itself. But this I expect will change. Zotero is designed to make those kind of changes very easy. It won't be too long before we see user-configurable reports, I expect. And even now you can do a fair bit with CSS stylesheets, I'm told.