find multiple archive entries simultaneously

knightjdr

With endnote I can add multiple citations simultaneously using pubmed IDs (PMIDs). For example, if at the end of a particular sentence I have ten articles I want to cite I can plug in all ten PMIDs into the endnote searchbar at the same time and it will find them all in my archive and insert the citations into my document. Similarly, if I go to pubmed and enter ten entries in the searchbar it will report the ten articles as a list in the results.

I can't figure out how to do this with Zotero. If I search for more than one PMID at a time it just doesn't find any of them, I guess because its looking for one entry that matches the entire search term instead of parsing the search term. At the moment I am having to click on the "multiple sources" tab and then search each PMID individually.

Is there a way I can locate multiple entries at once? I have tried using different separators but nothing seems to work.

adamsmith

you can't search for multiple identifiers at once, no*.
You can find multiple entries with a search term contained in all of them, but I figure that's not what you mean.

*to be precise - you can't do it at all in the word processor plugin and you can't do it with reasonable effort in Zotero itself - you can use an advanced search with 10 different lines and "any" as an operator, but that wouldn't seem to save any time.

knightjdr

Thanks, that's what I figured.

Probably the only thing I like better about endnote.

adamsmith

could you provide a more detailed usage scenario? E.g. why would you have a list of PMIDs of articles you want to cite in the first place?

I don't see this happening anytime soon, but it might be something devs consider for future versions. The easiest implementation would seem to be to allow some type of boolean OR operator in the quick search field - that would solve this at a more general level.
Selecting references in the word processor plugin seems to me perhaps the weakest spot of Zotero's workflow, it'd be great if it received some dev love...

knightjdr

Generally when I write I insert PMIDs into my word document as opposed to inserting references as I go, and then when I finish writing I use the PMIDs to insert the correct citations. Sometimes to support a statement I may need to cite 10 or more papers, so I'll have that many PMIDs as placeholders for the citations. With endnote, I can then just copy and paste the PMIDs into the endnote search field, it retrieves them all and I add the citation.

I have always found this easier than adding references as I go.