Zotero citation dialogue not opening in Scrivener

lasadea · 2026-02-28T17:51:47+00:00

Hello! I sincerely hope I am allowed to post this here.

I have Macbook Pro 14, Tahoe 26.3, Using Zotero 8.0.3, and Scrivener 3.5.2. I have selected Zotero as my citation manager in Scrivener.

I cannot, for the life of me, get the citation dialogue box to appear when I use the hotkey command + Y. The Zotero window pops up but not the dialogue box. I have restarted laptop, deleted Scrivener and reinstalled, closed both and re-opened, nothing works. Anyone have any idea how to get the citation dialogue box to appear?

lasadea · 2026-02-28T18:18:31+00:00

Debug ID: D1334797826

adamsmith · 2026-02-28T18:23:58+00:00

That's not Zotero functionality -- you'd have to figure out where the ability to set Zotero as a citation manager in Scrivener comes from (I didn't think this was Scrivener either) and report/ask for help there.

lasadea · 2026-02-28T18:29:54+00:00

@adamsmith yeah you can set bibliography managers in Scrivener. Ok, thanks for the tip!

kenwhitehurst · 2026-03-15T18:45:07+00:00

This has been a problem for me, too. I have Zotero set up as my reference manager in Scrivener, but the key command that once would return me neatly to Scrivener and add a citation with a single key stroke appears not to exist now, or something?
On the Scrivener boards, it was said it's Zotero that would have to be able to make the return to Scrivener with the chosen citation. There's some insistence in those forums that Zotero broke the connectivity somehow. What's the missing piece of the puzzle that would get this working? Must there now be a Word Processor add-in written by someone?

adamsmith · 2026-03-15T18:54:40+00:00

It's certainly possible that Zotero made breaking changes under the hood, but Zotero never supported any sort of integration with word processors other than the ones officially supported (i.e. LO, Word, GDocs), so whatever worked before was either a Scrivener feature or a 3rd party feature (I know the BetterBibTeX plugin for Zotero can do some related things, so that might have been involved?). From the Zotero end, no one even knows what functionality is involved that could have been broken.

So, my above advice still holds:
Figure out what exactly made this work before and then either (more likely) that can be updated to work with Zotero 8+ or there is a legitimate bug in Zotero 8 that Zotero can fix.

emilianoeheyns · 2026-03-15T20:03:51+00:00

CAYW in BBT broke in Z8, I am still figuring out why and find a fix.