Shortcut to editing entries in Zotero?

I am a very heavy Zotero user with thousands of bibliographic entries. It is a fantastic piece of software, but I have one question. When cross checking my citations in Word is there anyway to click on an entry in Word, and be able to have that entry brought up in zotero automatically? That way I can access attached PDFs very quickly to cross check my information derived from that source as well as double check the accuracy of my bibliographic information.

In other words, I'm double checking the accuracy of my entries, and I find that I constantly need to manually run searches for my bibliographic in zotero to find attached PDFs, when it would be far easier if I could just click on a specific citation in Word and have Zotero call up the entry automatically so that I can view attached PDFs, cross check information, etc.

Thoughts?
  • Click the citation in Word, click the Add/Edit Citation button, click the blue bubble (assuming you're using the default red citation dialog), and click Open in My Library. Zotero will come to the front with the item selected. The citation dialog remains open behind Zotero, so you'll want to bring it to the front again by cycling windows or by clicking the Add/Edit Citation button again.

    Note that the button will only appear if the item exists in Zotero. In some cases (e.g., if you deleted the item) it can exist only in the document.

    Now that Zotero has its own tab in the Word ribbon, it probably makes sense to just add a button to focus the selected item in Zotero.
  • (I've moved a discussion about adding a button to do the opposite — insert the currently selected item in Zotero — to a separate thread.)
  • Thank you, this is extremely helpful, I missed this because I use the classic editor. Is there a shortcut key for the function "open in my library"?
  • No, sorry. But as I say, we should probably make this a button in the ribbon, in which case you'd be able to assign a shortcut key to it.
  • edited July 15, 2019
    How would the button function for a multi-item citation? Show a drop down menu?
  • I think it could just select the first item, which would be sufficient much of the time. We wouldn't remove the button from the citation dialog if you wanted to access the others this way (though, really, just switching to Zotero and searching is probably faster, unless you're unsure whether/where a citation is linked).

    Or we could pop up a custom alert with a drop-down and close it after, but I'm not sure that's necessary. (And I suspect we couldn't show a dynamic drop-down right in the ribbon, though @adomasven would know better.)
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