Searching articles

bkastl

When I want to search for an article based on topic, author, or tags, I first click on "My Library", then I type a word in the box titled: "All Fields and Tags". However, when the articles appear, I can't see which of my many folder collections they are from. Is there any way to easily see which collection and subcollection folder they are from?

dstillman

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/collections_containing_an_item

bkastl

Also, what is the difference between searching "All fields & tags" vs. "Everything". Does "Everything" include text in PDFs? If not, is there any way to search all PDF text?

dstillman

Does "Everything" include text in PDFs?

Yes.

bkastl

Your quick comments are helpful!

When I search "Everything" for specific phrases that are only in a single PDF, it still shows many articles. But the specific phrase is not in each PDF. Any idea why it still shows many articles?

dstillman

The words are likely matching individually. If you want to do a phrase search, put it "in quotes".

bkastl

I tried putting phrases in quotes that I know exist in the PDFs but nothing comes up. I wish that worked because that's exactly what I'm hoping for. Ideas why it's not working?

adamsmith

do the PDFs show as indexed (select and check on the right)?

bkastl

When I select them (one click), information about the atricle and a blank text area shows up in the right pane

adamsmith

Right, and the information about the article includes "Indexed: " followed by either yes or no

bkastl

yes, it is followed by "yes" and two green arrows going in a circle

bwiernik

Okay, "yes" for Indexed means that Zotero has extracted text from the PDF that it searches. The green arrows is a button to re-index the PDF.

When you open that PDF, can you search for the text in your PDF reader and have it found?

bkastl

It seems to be working now. It may have just been something with the PDF when I tried it earlier. Thank you!!!