Upgrade StoragePatent and Patent Application Organization
Hello, I'm new to Zotero and I'm having issues with importing and organizing patents and patent applications. First off, thank you to the developers and others who volunteer their time on this. It's amazing to have free software like Zotero available. My goal is to primarily use Zotero for file organization and searching. Citing references for publication is a distant second. As far as I can tell, Zotero has a "patent" item type, but not a "patent application" item type. They are different things. Additionally, trying to import metadata from, for example, Google patents, results in many data errors. Is this a known issue? Can we get a patent application type? It would be really useful to be able to have custom data types and fields for individuals. If there is a best practices workflow for dealing with patents and patent applications, I would appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction! Thank you.
You should store both as “Patent” and distinguish them using the Legal Status field.
Importing data is limited by what the Google Patents site provides. What specific issues are you seeing with import? I believe that the US PTO website often has better data.
Customs fields/types are planned for the medium term. For now, the Exta field, collections, and tags are available for storing additional data. You can store multiple items in Extra on new lines.