Suggest new references?

Is there a discovery tool that analyzes my Zotero library and suggests new papers that could be of interest to me?
  • Not at the moment, no. Of the available tools that do this, I find that Google Scholar’s is the best.
  • edited July 26, 2017
    Google Scholar will send you an email (as narrow an interval as daily) that includes links to all recently-identified articles, book chapters, reports, etc. that concern the search terms that you enter.

    Sign into your google account and go to Google Scholar. At the top of the page you will see several icons. Click "Alerts". You will be prompted to enter search terms for an update alert. You can have several different alerts. It will be helpful to think about the words that may be used in the articles about the topics that interest you. My searches concern injury prevention topics. Wildcards and Boolean terms are accepted. Thus, among my search strings are:

    [ ("motor vehicle" OR "traffic") AND ("crash*" OR "injur*" OR "death*" OR "acciden*")]

    [ "traumatic brain injur*" OR "TBI" OR concussion* ]

    [ poisoning OR overdose ]

    [ suicide OR "self harm" OR "self-harm*" OR "self injur*" OR self-injur*"]

    The selection of search strings is as much art as it is science. You will need to test what terms to truncate with wildcards and which should not be treated that way. For example, I will likely miss a number of items about poisons because I use the full word "poisoning". However, I am willing to accept that because if I search on "poison*" I will get all manner of articles about fouled chemical processes unrelated to human or animal poisoning AND lots of references to literary texts that refer to a destructive or corrupting effect..."meanwhile he is spreading his poison over the Internet".

    To import the items into Zotero be sure to click through to the item on the publisher's website.

    There is a problem (an inconvenience, really) that is already being addressed by Zotero developers. Sometimes, when you click through to the publisher's site from the email update (Mac OS); the Zotero icon will not change from webpage icon to article icon to allow its metadata to be brought into your database. (It is as though the page never finishes loading.) If you simply refresh the web-page it will reload quickly and the proper Zotero icon will rapidly appear allowing you to import the article's metadata.

    edit:
    [https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/66358/5-beta-231-need-to-refresh-webpage-to-get-journal-article-import-icon#latest]

    Nonetheless, this marriage between Zotero and Google Scholar is a truly beautiful thing.


  • Serendip-o-matic used to do exactly this, but it no longer seems to be receiving updates and gives me an error. Anyone know of the status of this, or if the team intends to revive it?
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