Easy way to look up item in Google Scholar, or any search engine?

mjbaldwin
I frequently find myself wanting to open an item in my Zotero library inside of Google Scholar, to look up what has cited it, related articles, etc.

I currently copy and paste the title and it usually works. Sometimes I drag the item into Scholar's search box which includes the author and DOI and that works too.

But I would find it even more convenient if there were a right-click item within Zotero itself to look up an item in any search engine, which could come with presets for Scholar, JSTOR, etc.

So this is either a feature request, or if there's a hidden feature or if a plug-in exists I'd love to know. Googling this has been pretty impossible, since all the results wind up about being importing things *from* Scholar *to* Zotero, and I'm looking for the opposite direction -- to take something *already in* Zotero in then open it in Scholar.
  • adamsmith
    That's what the locate menu (bottom of right-hand pane in Zotero 7) is for:
    https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u2433/jxqzzrmbfx8ygckybk0o.png
  • mjbaldwin
    Thank you SO much! It seemed so basic I couldn't believe it wasn't there.

    I'd expected it to be in the context menu, then I looked through the menubar (Mac), and couldn't find anything. And then the Google search for the feature failed for the reason I described...

    I *never* would have found that Locate button without your help, since all the other buttons next to it scroll to sections of the item. Now I can see the faint gray divider, but still.

    Exactly what I needed!

    I don't know if other people might also have difficulty finding the Locate feature... it definitely feels like something important enough that it might deserve a spot in the context menu. Thanks so much!
  • tim820
    edited November 14, 2024
    Re checking a list of all citations of an item *from within Zotero*, that is an option in the new v7-compatible version of the Reference plugin (uses a free Semantic Scholar API key). That is an addition to its previous core function - extracting the paper's reference list, showing which are already in your library, and allowing you to download any you don't have. Each item in the reference list is displayed with its number of citations. You select whether you want the right pane list to show the paper's References or its Citations (citing references). It's very powerful (some of the functionality does depend on whether references have locatable information in online repositories). I find myself using Google Scholar much less often.
    https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference
    (Google Chrome's translation works well, althouh some of the screen shots are from from the previous version)

    The way the plugin looks and works has changed since Zotero v6, and the plugin settings page in v7 currently still only appears in Chinese, but a translation is here:
    https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference/issues/305#issuecomment-2408822440
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