Capability to search for books or papers without an account and autocomplete functionality

arisgk

Hi Zotero community,

I wasn't sure where to ask the question, so please let me know if this is not the intended place.

I had in mind the following user experience flow to add citations (from a word processor plugin):
1. Be able to search for books or papers without building my own library from scratch.
2. Have autocomplete functionality (e.g as I am typing, I am getting results in a list). When I click at one result, the citation is added to the document in my preferred citation style.

Do you think that would be a good user flow to add to Zotero? Is there anything big I am missing here that makes the above flow not suitable or impossible?

Thank you,
Aris

dstillman

You don't need an account to use Zotero. You do need to save items to your library first if you want to cite them, and that's unlikely to change. Zotero is designed primarily for a web-based workflow, where you cite things as you do research on the web. If you're citing something, you generally want to actually have the item organized in a collection, to check the metadata for correctness while you still have the resource up, to have the PDF (which usually comes from the website you're on), to potentially make annotations in the PDF or add notes, etc.

Zotero does have Add Item by Identifier, which lets you quickly add items to your library by DOI, ISBN, etc., without saving from the web, but depending on your institutional network setup that may be less likely to attach a PDF automatically, which is one of the reasons we haven't extended that to support fuller metadata searching or URL-based saving — it's just not the best way to save for most people. And since Zotero can save essentially anything, from any webpage, any sort of search or autocomplete would be inherently limited. You're better off just searching the web — Google has searching down pretty well — and saving from there.