Some things I used to do in EndNote that I wish I could do in Zotero
I have had enough of EndNote and am switching to Zotero but there are a couple things I could do in EndNote that I really miss.
One is being able to quickly copy and paste a citation from the EndNote application into MS Word. The equivalent function in Zotero would be to copy (command-C on my Mac) and then paste the citation into my Word document. Is there any way to do that in Zotero?
The other is being able to sort my window by Creator last name only and have it not include first name, initials, periods, etc. I would then do a secondary sort by year, so I could see all of an author's publications in chronological order and not sorted by their first name, initials, etc. Is it possible to do that in Zotero?
Bill
One is being able to quickly copy and paste a citation from the EndNote application into MS Word. The equivalent function in Zotero would be to copy (command-C on my Mac) and then paste the citation into my Word document. Is there any way to do that in Zotero?
The other is being able to sort my window by Creator last name only and have it not include first name, initials, periods, etc. I would then do a secondary sort by year, so I could see all of an author's publications in chronological order and not sorted by their first name, initials, etc. Is it possible to do that in Zotero?
Bill
2. I don't think that's possible, no. FWIW, we strongly recommend keeping author first names the same across references. Authors with different first names (e.g. initials vs. full first name etc.) are treated as different authors by Zotero, so you'd get weird behavior in citations and reference lists as well.
extensions.zotero.sortCreatorAsString
to true in the Config Editor from the Advanced pane of the preferences, which will sort by the visible Creator field, including "et al" but not including first names.I also would like to sort my Zotero window by last name only of the author, which makes it easier to get a chronological list of the authors publications in the window.
Note, also, that you can assign a keyboard shortcut for Add/Edit Citation or the other actions. There's no reason this needs to be slow. Press Ctrl-C (or whatever you set as the shortcut in Word), type "smith" or "smith 2020", and press "Return". That's it. You can even add page numbers via that bar at the same time without using the mouse.
The ability to insert the currently selected item in Zotero via a button in the plugin toolbar is something we've discussed and will probably happen at some point. I think this may be a misunderstanding. As adamsmith says, first names and initials should be stored the same in your database for citations and bibliographies to work, so it should already sort the same authors together.
As I explained above, if you really want to ignore last names, you can configure it to sort by the visible creator string, which doesn't include first names, but you'd just be potentially mixing authors with different names.
I'm coming from EndNote and I am very used to using the application to browse, where I can see a preview of the correct reference in the right pane and then pressing ctrl+2 to add the highlighted reference to my word document.
I can see why you would assume that I'd want to stay in word, but I'm visual and can't always remember the name of the author or file so I use my experience of my whole library to find what I'm looking for.
So, +1 to add an option to "insert currently selected item in Zotero" - and how can I know when it's been added? Thanks!
Having a group created from inserted references helps me understand (1) the variety of references I've used in a paper, (2) serves as a quick access to the references and specifically their PDFs that I might have already used and need to refer back to for more info.