Upgrade Storageusing Zotero & notes for research
This isn't a request for technical help but for other researchers & students to share advice & work practices.
I have recently begin using Zotero to manage citations for my PhD and I'm really happy with it. I was recommended the notes function by a fellow student but I can't get my head around it, so I'd like to hear how others use it.
My current system is to use textedit on Mac to take notes on everything I read, one file per item, named systematically and stored with the pdf of the original item (if there is one) in thematic folders (I don't tend to annotate pdfs themselves, as it's not really how I think). I've had this system going since undergrad so there's a lot in there and I keep it very tidy.
What I was really hoping I could do with Zotero is create annotated bibliographies, which I have to do quite a lot. But having read all the relevant threads I see that can only be done with the extra & abstract fields, which doesn't help me (it's hardly comfortable typing in that box, so if I wanted to use it I'd have to use some other text editor then paste it in).
In the absence of an annotated bibliography function, I'm struggling to see the utility of notes. Yes, they link automatically to the item, which saves me the time of making a text file & typing out a filename, and I presume they can be synced, but I only ever use my own laptop anyway so that doesn't matter much to me.
Am I missing something in my understanding of how notes work? Is there some cool function people are using notes for? Is there a better workaround for creating an annotated bibliography that hasn't been mentioned in the discussions so far?
Many thanks for advice & thanks for Zotero itself.
I have recently begin using Zotero to manage citations for my PhD and I'm really happy with it. I was recommended the notes function by a fellow student but I can't get my head around it, so I'd like to hear how others use it.
My current system is to use textedit on Mac to take notes on everything I read, one file per item, named systematically and stored with the pdf of the original item (if there is one) in thematic folders (I don't tend to annotate pdfs themselves, as it's not really how I think). I've had this system going since undergrad so there's a lot in there and I keep it very tidy.
What I was really hoping I could do with Zotero is create annotated bibliographies, which I have to do quite a lot. But having read all the relevant threads I see that can only be done with the extra & abstract fields, which doesn't help me (it's hardly comfortable typing in that box, so if I wanted to use it I'd have to use some other text editor then paste it in).
In the absence of an annotated bibliography function, I'm struggling to see the utility of notes. Yes, they link automatically to the item, which saves me the time of making a text file & typing out a filename, and I presume they can be synced, but I only ever use my own laptop anyway so that doesn't matter much to me.
Am I missing something in my understanding of how notes work? Is there some cool function people are using notes for? Is there a better workaround for creating an annotated bibliography that hasn't been mentioned in the discussions so far?
Many thanks for advice & thanks for Zotero itself.
If you do want to keep using external text files, you can attach those to the items in Zotero so they are easily accessible. If you don’t want to do that, another thing you can do is install the Zutlio plugin. Among other things, this plugin adds a Create Zotero Select Link option to the right click menu. This creates a link that will automatically take you to the Zotero item when you click it. You can place this at the top of the text files to link to the article they describe. In more advanced text editors, like VS Code or Atom, you can click these links directly in the text editor.
Editing in Extra box is horrible (could we have a pop-up window, I do all work in desktop app)) so I create my notes in Zotero as separate tagged notes but then cut and paste into Extra. I can then create annotated bibliographies.
However create bibliography strips new-lines so if the bnotes are more rthan a couple of lines the result is too dense to be useful. There seems to be no way to format it (from the forums).
So I am adding tags at end of each line then I can do a search and replace in Word to to create the line breaks. All these workrounds are a pain, I cannot understand why Zotero is stripping new-line/white space out of the Extra field (I have not checked Abstract). Fixing this would make Zotero MUCH better.
The forum strips my html new-line tags that I tried to mention between 'adding' and 'tags' but it does not process them.
I tried to figure out how to do it with the CSSs and whatnot, but it's not my cup of tea, alas. Solution to this problem hugely appreciated!
Martin
I am willing to pay for someone to make this for me.
Well, I am a grad on a stipend, but yeah.Opening issue :D
Thanks, Emiliano!
<pre>support, in which case it wouldn't be in principle infeasible for "Collected Notes".No promises though.
What would be *in principle* possible with BBT is that stuff in latex-protected sections (which is a BBT-specific facility) could be left alone in the same way BBT currently does for other parts. This will look janky in Zotero, but could (again, in principle) be used to generate valid latex which *would* render well.
To be clear, I'm absolutely not going to add mathjax rendering to Zotero. I don't do GUI work unless absolutely inescapably required. And since the notes in Zotero are WYSIWYG, parsing out protected sections is going to be pretty tricky, and I don't know whether it can be done with a reasonable effort. But I'm curious enough to give it a go if you open an issue on the github tracker for better bibtex.
Another option would be to try to find the mathjax sections and inject the mathjax libraries. This might be possible to do in the report customizer. For that you would have to open an issue on the report customizer githhub project. But in any case, you will have to hand-edit latex-like math, and that will remain visible everywhere that's not produced by BBT/report customizer.
The only thing is... (of course there's always one more thing) that I can't figure out how to make each item to start on a new page.
I tried to fiddle with css files, but the report customizer seems to use a different one from the standard report, and I can't figure it out. I'd love to do something about the different fonts and font sizes too, but that's of lesser concern. Editing in Word is no option, because Word messes up the emojis in my tags (it's not up to date with the newest set, can't figure out how to fix that, either).
I even looked into some javascript to run a report, separately, for each item selected, but I can't figure that out, either. My strengths lie elsewhere =)
Can you offer some advice?
Thanks a lot for the new feature, it just might save my life as a math PhD student :) However, I am wondering how to use it. I tried to install the latest version of RC and put $\int$ in my notes file, but the report doesn't have an integral symbol. Do I misunderstand how this works?
Thanks in advance