it's only available in the app, but it does sync between devices, just not the the web interface, which add-ons can't change.

It might be possible to hack something unofficial right now if you have BBT save it to the Extra field, but official support will only come with a new CSL version and field updates in Zotero, both likely this year (definitely true for CSL, optimistic but no promises for Zotero).

The Extra field might be a reasonable hack, though, especially if I can get BBT to write it in both places for me. Thank you for that suggestion.

The BBT “pin” option saves the key to Extra.

The delay is there so that if you import a new item through the browser addon, you have some time to actually correct problems in the new item before the key is frozen.

Ok, thank you @bwiernik and @qqbb on how to use the pin option for this. It worked, though I guess I have to refresh the whole database. NBD.

@emilianoeheyns My issue was that it's not displayed at all in the *web library*, so I was wondering if it is part of the synced database or only on my local machine.

However (oops), it turns out I didn't fully solve the underlying problem.

I had been hoping to refer people to papers using a link to the public group collection on the web plus the citekey (via a shared database that already has these citekeys in it), but now that I've got the citekey into the Extra, I realised the web library doesn't allow search by field, so it doesn't point them directly to the paper (except by manually reverse engineering it).

Do any of you know if there is a way to search fields on the web library, or if it's in a an upcoming feature?

I may just have to suggest they get Zotero accounts to search by key.

@emilianoeheyns I thought about trying to use the public link, but I don't see an obvious way to find the link either manually or programmatically, other than searching it myself on my computer and then opening the web library and searching it there based on the author/title, which would be a time consuming and clunky manual process.

If you could explain what you're thinking more explicitly, I'd be appreciative!

So, as a concrete example, I set up my public group library so far with only one item in it to test. That one item is here: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2691979/mostly-fat/items/FS9HLUF2/library

For whatever reason, there is no file on my system with the string FS9HLUF2 in its name or contents that I can find. (Some other items have a corresponding directory in ./Zotero/storage, but that one and many others do not.)

I suppose I could write something to periodically iterate over all of https://www.zotero.org/groups/2691979/mostly-fat/items/ and parse out the citation key, and then set up a forwarding system, but that is way more work than I wanted to just share bibliographies!

Thank you, @qqbb !