Quick Jump from Citation in Word Processor to Cited Document

edited February 2, 2021
Hello, all -

Is there a quick way to jump from a citation to the cited document attached to the citation in Zotero? For example, one might right click on the citation in Microsoft Word, choose some command, and immediately the PDF (or other format document) of the cited paper or book would open.

The fastest way I have found thus far:
- open the footnote or endnote
- click inside it
- choose Edit Citation (using my assigned keyboard shortcut: Control-Opt-C on Mac)
- it takes a while (around 1-2 minutes) for the citation edit dialogue to appear (in my large document and ever-growing Zotero database)
- click on the document name in the red citation edit dialogue
- press "Open in My Library" button
- double-click the found item in the Zotero library to open the attached cited document

Considering all those steps, and especially the slow response of Edit Citation, I have found it faster to switch to Zotero and manually search for the document by name. That's also not particularly efficient, though.

Is there already some faster way to accomplish this? If not, perhaps it can be on the wish-list of features. Maybe even a command that could be assigned to a keyboard shortcut. Ideally one would not even have to open the footnote or endnote; one could just right-click on the citation # in the main text and choose the command, or select the citation # and enter the keyboard shortcut, and the cited document would open.

Thank you for consideration. (I searched herein and did not find any further info on such an approach).

Best regards,
ZM
  • No faster way than what you said, but a future version of Zotero may include a plugin button to open the citation in Zotero with a single click.
  • having just had to fix the metadata for some items cited in a piece and spread out over several groups, that'd be lovely.
  • edited February 5, 2021
    @dstillman Thank you for that. Glad this is under consideration. I suspect many others would value this feature.

    At least in the way I work, I often start with just some initial quote, paraphrase, from a source, inserted into my document. Then later I go back to those sources and read them in more detail, and add more detail into my document accordingly. So I'm always jumping back to sources.

    Sometimes I even just put an endnote for a source with nothing taken from it yet, as a kind of placeholder/reminder, with intention to go back and read; I may not have even read the source yet at all, but just think it may be relevant. So at start of document or start of relevant section, I might have the word RESEARCH with a series of footnote numbers after it, each citing texts I aim to review later and use as references. Initially those citations will not include any specific page numbers; I'll fill those in later...if I end up using the citation. So it would be great to just click the citation # in some special way (key combination or contextual menu) and jump right into the PDF in Acrobat or Preview.

    (I'm also trying this approach in Zotero instead, creating a subcollection called RESEARCH for a given project)
Sign In or Register to comment.