For et al, I find myself commonly typing Author et al 2010 while searching; also appears when I copy-paste citations from elsewhere into the Zotero Word plugin search.

For DOI, this would match features with other tools (e.g., PaperPile, RStudio), but I think that would probably only make sense if Zotero would Add by Identifier the DOI if it wasn’t available. That’s what those tools do. That would personally be useful for me for adding citations where a co-author gave me the DOI/full reference as a comment.

@bwiernik, you well explained the use case of these features.

For me, it could be also useful while doing faster (re-)inserting Zotero-like citations in documents/manuscripts that used manually inserted citations (i.e. by simple text by other co-authors, that don't use Zotero/Mendelay); or (old) document's links to Zotero were removed and now I want to associated with Zotero citations again.

@adomasven, thank you for opening tickets.

Yes, bwiernik suggested that above. I don't know exactly how the other tools handle it, but it seems a bit awkward to me, for a number of reasons:

1) It means that the dialog would need to work in two distinct ways: as a find-as-you-type search that doesn't require you to press Return, and as a network-based search that only triggers when you press Return. And while both title/creator/year and DOI would work for the former, only a DOI would work for the latter, unless we greatly extend Zotero's ability to add items directly via search. That all seems a bit conceptually muddled.

2) It would make it easier to create duplicates. E.g., if you paste a DOI for an item you already have that doesn't happen to have the DOI entered, you'd create a duplicate without seeing the existing item, as you likely would if you used Add Item by Identifier.

3) It can't just save — you would have to be able to choose a library and possibly collection to save to, which means reproducing something akin to the connector's save popup. To complicate matters, we'll likely be merging some form of collection/item browsing from the classic citation dialog into the main one, but it's not totally clear how that would interact with this, or what would happen when that was closed.

So while I understand the use case, I do think it risks making things more confusing. But we'll experiment.

Current Web-browser plugins and Zotero Standalone just saves new items into active directory. This logic could remain for Word Processor integration plugin too.

In the Zotero Connector, you can expand the save popup to choose a different library or collection. In Zotero itself, you're already looking at the collections list. The word processor plugins couldn't just save to the wherever you happen to be in the Zotero app, behind your other windows, without providing a way to change the destination.

Another very similar to "et al" suggestion:
now Zotero ignores "and" (e.g. if we search "Author1 and Author2 2020"), but only English "and"; it would be nice, if Zotero could ignore localised/translated "and".