Upgrade StorageFeature request: Integrated select/scan reference list, and find held/missing refs
OK, just putting this out there so maybe it's on the radar for (far?) future planning. I know it's a big ask.
One of the major tasks in reading papers is looking at the references that the authors have cited, as you read, and seeing if you already have them in your library. The ways of doing this are clunky in all reference management tools I have used. One is constantly jumping back and forth from the text to the reference list (now made somewhat easier by Duplicate tabs in the PDF reader), and then having to look through one's own library to find the reference.
A solution to greatly streamline this important process would be the ability to select the text of the reference list in a published article PDF, and have it auto-parsed and extracted to a dedicated right pane References tab. Manual 'clean up' of the parsing might be required in some cases. I know there are external tools for reference extraction, but they need to be integrated in Zotero for an efficient workflow.
A further tedious aspect of dealing with cited references is checking if one already has a reference in one's library; and then locating a copy if one doesn't already have it. So there would ideally be a 'find reference(s) in library' option to scan one's library for the existence of extracted references, with hot links then established to the references already there (like the 'Related' tab). So one could jump straight to a cited reference from the References tab as one is reading a paper, as is often required (and then back again to where you were in the article, if the previously-requested 'History' option is also implemented). There would also be an option to select and scan for any missing cited references in the wider internet (eg by title/ DOI), as is possible now.
The end result would be that each paper that you had extracted references from would have a complete reference list in the right pane References tab. In that tab you could see which References you already have, and jump straight to them. The ability to add an annotation to any reference there in the list would be nice too.
I did say it was a big ask ! ;)
One of the major tasks in reading papers is looking at the references that the authors have cited, as you read, and seeing if you already have them in your library. The ways of doing this are clunky in all reference management tools I have used. One is constantly jumping back and forth from the text to the reference list (now made somewhat easier by Duplicate tabs in the PDF reader), and then having to look through one's own library to find the reference.
A solution to greatly streamline this important process would be the ability to select the text of the reference list in a published article PDF, and have it auto-parsed and extracted to a dedicated right pane References tab. Manual 'clean up' of the parsing might be required in some cases. I know there are external tools for reference extraction, but they need to be integrated in Zotero for an efficient workflow.
A further tedious aspect of dealing with cited references is checking if one already has a reference in one's library; and then locating a copy if one doesn't already have it. So there would ideally be a 'find reference(s) in library' option to scan one's library for the existence of extracted references, with hot links then established to the references already there (like the 'Related' tab). So one could jump straight to a cited reference from the References tab as one is reading a paper, as is often required (and then back again to where you were in the article, if the previously-requested 'History' option is also implemented). There would also be an option to select and scan for any missing cited references in the wider internet (eg by title/ DOI), as is possible now.
The end result would be that each paper that you had extracted references from would have a complete reference list in the right pane References tab. In that tab you could see which References you already have, and jump straight to them. The ability to add an annotation to any reference there in the list would be nice too.
I did say it was a big ask ! ;)