Upgrade StorageFeature request: bulk reference search
Hi Zotero team,
I'm loving Zotero, but there's a small feature I wish Zotero had.
Basically, when reading a paper or a thesis, I often find myself looking up some of the sources the publication refers to. Normally this would require jumping to the reference section, picking an interesting-looking source and copy-pasting the reference into Google Scholar. If the source is found, I can then save it to the Zotero database via the Connector. This is straightforward enough, until you have to search many references (there are some use cases where you have to look up A LOT of them, e.g. when doing a comprehensive literature review on a topic, or trying to make a long-overdue switch from manual referencing to using Zotero :)
To help with this task, I wrote a script in AutoHotkey. It does the job for me, but it would probably be sleeker and more useful to the wider audience if it were incorporated into Zotero.
The basic functionality is:
- open a file containing the publication (giving user an option to paste the text directly into the window)
- let the user jump to the bibliography section in one click, and trim off the rest of the text
- let the user remove line breaks that are contained in a PDF in one click (thus repairing the references that were broken up into several lines)
- convert the references into a list, and let the user select multiple items
- let the user search selected items by opening Google Scholar tabs in the default browser
Then, user can go through the tabs, read the abstracts and save the sources into Zotero by using the Connector, as they normally would.
You can have a look at the script here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/academic-tech-toolbox/
If you think its functionality could be useful to Zotero users, you can use it as a prototype to implement the feature (the script is Open Source, of course).
Looking forward to your feedback, and good luck with the Zotero project!
I'm loving Zotero, but there's a small feature I wish Zotero had.
Basically, when reading a paper or a thesis, I often find myself looking up some of the sources the publication refers to. Normally this would require jumping to the reference section, picking an interesting-looking source and copy-pasting the reference into Google Scholar. If the source is found, I can then save it to the Zotero database via the Connector. This is straightforward enough, until you have to search many references (there are some use cases where you have to look up A LOT of them, e.g. when doing a comprehensive literature review on a topic, or trying to make a long-overdue switch from manual referencing to using Zotero :)
To help with this task, I wrote a script in AutoHotkey. It does the job for me, but it would probably be sleeker and more useful to the wider audience if it were incorporated into Zotero.
The basic functionality is:
- open a file containing the publication (giving user an option to paste the text directly into the window)
- let the user jump to the bibliography section in one click, and trim off the rest of the text
- let the user remove line breaks that are contained in a PDF in one click (thus repairing the references that were broken up into several lines)
- convert the references into a list, and let the user select multiple items
- let the user search selected items by opening Google Scholar tabs in the default browser
Then, user can go through the tabs, read the abstracts and save the sources into Zotero by using the Connector, as they normally would.
You can have a look at the script here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/academic-tech-toolbox/
If you think its functionality could be useful to Zotero users, you can use it as a prototype to implement the feature (the script is Open Source, of course).
Looking forward to your feedback, and good luck with the Zotero project!
It's not 100% perfect - sometimes it mis-parses references, and sometimes it fails to sense that you already have a given reference in your library (this would be helped if the Zotero Connector had the ability to tell you that you already have an item you are about to download). But overall it's pretty powerful.
Its README is now available in English. And right-click Google Translate in Chrome does a good job of translating other things, like its github Issues discussions in Chinese.
https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference