Searching within notes

Benjamin Berger · November 3, 2014

Is there a way that one can search for words within a note? If I have a long note summarizing my comments and citations from a piece, I would love to be able to easily search and find a keyword without pasting the whole note into a word doc and using the "find" feature there.

adamsmith · November 3, 2014

Not really. In Firefox, ctrl+F will work in HTML note. This is a known issue and generally a fix is planned, but I don't know of anything imminent, so might still take a while.

gregmichener · December 15, 2014

This is a key limitation of Zotero and must be improved!

ftr · January 7, 2015

If you want to use the notes for note tzking and not forget them once written then you need to be able to search in notes.

Today, Zotero is an excellent biblio program.
But anyone who writes a publication needs a solution for archiving his or her bibliographic information - this is Zotero , structuring ideas, writing. If note taking leaves notes in hte mist this is a serious limitation.

adamsmith · January 7, 2015

Just to be clear - notes _are_ included in searches (and you can serach in notes exclusively via advanced search). You can just not search _within_ an individual note.

Julie Damaggio · January 20, 2015

The only solution I found for myself was to generate reports of the notes found by the search and then use ctrl+F to find the occurrences inside the note.
I associate with Benjamin Berger and gregmichener to ask for such an improvement directly inside Zotero.

magtun · January 28, 2021

The search feature is quite useless: the find panel is too big and it hides most of the text and often the selected match, and the selected matches are often out of the screen when the note contains some HTML tags (cf. https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/87323/search-feature-in-the-notes-the-highlighted-matches-results-are-off-screen?new=1).

(I currently use an AutoHotkey script that opens the source code in VScode, and which then open the HTML extension, and finally open the VScode search. It takes quite a while to search stuff).