Quick way to find annotated papers?

Is there a quick way of seeing that a given paper has already got annotations on it, without having to open it? And a way to find all papers that have annotations?
  • If you have turned your annotations into a note, you simply can add the column "Notes" to the main view of your library
  • Thanks for the quick answer! I should clarify that I’m using the built-in PDF annotation feature, so my annotations are not automatically turned into notes.
  • edited October 14, 2022
    At the moment, you can create a saved search for [Item Type] [is] [Annotation] and it will return all the attachments with annotations.

    There's not currently any other way to see that an attachment has annotations without opening it.

    We'll be exposing annotations in the library view in a future version, and we might consider some other ways of showing and/or sorting by the presence of annotations (e.g., an Annotations column, similar to Notes and Attachments).
  • Love the saved search for this, @danstillman. Thanks for that!
  • Thanks, that's useful. An annotation column would be great!
  • How about a modified PDF icon, e.g., with a pen, similar to the new Preprint icon?

    Here's a related discussion:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/96173/zotero-pdf-reader-how-do-i-know-whether-a-pdf-has-annotations
  • Perhaps a little clarification: The search mentioned above (thanks!) only shows reliable results if the annotations were made with the built-in PDF reader, or if an imported PDF was at least opened once so that Zotero could extract the annotations to its database.
  • @drsb: We're going to add automatically processing of new PDFs to detect external annotations, but that doesn't exist yet.
  • Regarding the Saved Search, I can only get it to return the results for the entire library. If I limit it to a collection, the search Item Type is Annotations does not return any results. Am I missing something?
    Thanks
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