Upgrade StorageNew plugin: shows a cited paper's abstract when you hover a citation in the PDF reader
Hi all,
I've written a small plugin for Zotero 7+ that I've found useful while reading papers, and I'd like to share it.
What it does
Since Zotero 7, hovering an in-text citation like [12] in the built-in PDF reader shows a popup with the resolved reference. This plugin adds the cited work's abstract to that same popup. You can decide whether a reference is worth following up without leaving the page or opening the bibliography.
Local by default. It looks the reference up in your own library: My Library first, then any group libraries. Out of the box it makes no network requests.
Optional online lookup. For citations that aren't in your library, you can turn on a setting that checks Crossref, then Semantic Scholar. It's off by default. If you use it, I recommend a free Semantic Scholar API key, because their anonymous rate limit is tight.
Grouped citations like [27, 33] are handled. Each reference gets its own abstract.
Tolerant matching. Titles garbled by PDF text extraction (lost hyphens, ligatures, accents) still match your library items.
Tells you why. When no abstract is found, the popup says what happened for each source, e.g. "not in your library", "record found, but no abstract available" or "rate limited".
Install
Download zotero-hover-abstract.xpi from the latest release.
In Zotero, open Tools → Plugins and drag the .xpi onto the Plugins window.
Optionally, set it up in Zotero Settings → Zotero Hover Abstract.
The plugin updates itself through Zotero's normal plugin update mechanism.
Privacy and trust
The plugin is open source (MIT), so you can read exactly what it does. It only reads your library and never modifies items. With the default settings it makes no network requests. If you turn on online lookup, it sends only the citation's DOI or title/reference text to Crossref and Semantic Scholar.
Known limitations
It only works on PDFs with a real text layer (no scanned PDFs).
It depends on the structure of Zotero's own citation popup, which isn't a documented API, so a future Zotero release could break it. I'll try to keep up.
Crossref's abstract coverage is patchy. Many publishers, ACM included, don't deposit abstracts there at all.
Source, issues and feedback: https://github.com/edouardArmit/zotero-hover-abstract
Bug reports and suggestions are welcome, either here or on GitHub.
I've written a small plugin for Zotero 7+ that I've found useful while reading papers, and I'd like to share it.
What it does
Since Zotero 7, hovering an in-text citation like [12] in the built-in PDF reader shows a popup with the resolved reference. This plugin adds the cited work's abstract to that same popup. You can decide whether a reference is worth following up without leaving the page or opening the bibliography.
Local by default. It looks the reference up in your own library: My Library first, then any group libraries. Out of the box it makes no network requests.
Optional online lookup. For citations that aren't in your library, you can turn on a setting that checks Crossref, then Semantic Scholar. It's off by default. If you use it, I recommend a free Semantic Scholar API key, because their anonymous rate limit is tight.
Grouped citations like [27, 33] are handled. Each reference gets its own abstract.
Tolerant matching. Titles garbled by PDF text extraction (lost hyphens, ligatures, accents) still match your library items.
Tells you why. When no abstract is found, the popup says what happened for each source, e.g. "not in your library", "record found, but no abstract available" or "rate limited".
Install
Download zotero-hover-abstract.xpi from the latest release.
In Zotero, open Tools → Plugins and drag the .xpi onto the Plugins window.
Optionally, set it up in Zotero Settings → Zotero Hover Abstract.
The plugin updates itself through Zotero's normal plugin update mechanism.
Privacy and trust
The plugin is open source (MIT), so you can read exactly what it does. It only reads your library and never modifies items. With the default settings it makes no network requests. If you turn on online lookup, it sends only the citation's DOI or title/reference text to Crossref and Semantic Scholar.
Known limitations
It only works on PDFs with a real text layer (no scanned PDFs).
It depends on the structure of Zotero's own citation popup, which isn't a documented API, so a future Zotero release could break it. I'll try to keep up.
Crossref's abstract coverage is patchy. Many publishers, ACM included, don't deposit abstracts there at all.
Source, issues and feedback: https://github.com/edouardArmit/zotero-hover-abstract
Bug reports and suggestions are welcome, either here or on GitHub.