Hello Everyone,

I’m new to Zotero and already appreciate many of its great features. However, I’m running into an issue.

I opened one of my full-text PDFs, highlighted various excerpts, and added tags to certain highlights.

I was hoping to be able to type a tag into Zotero’s main search box and see all excerpts across my PDFs that have that tag, along with their sources.

For example, I’d like to highlight a sentence discussing a literature gap, tag it “Literature Gap,” and later search that tag to quickly find all such excerpts across my library.

The problem I am encountering is that after tagging highlights in a PDF, I notice that when I close the PDF, the “Tags” count at the bottom of the Full Text PDF pane shows 0. The tag count also shows 0 when I click to see the list of my Annotations for the document. I notice that my tags don't even appear in the list of annotations when I open the Annotations pane.

The tags do appear under the individual annotation in the annotations list located under the PDF in the Full Text PDF pane, and it also appears in the tag list in the bottom-left corner of the main Zotero window.

However, when I search for one of my tags created when highlighting text in a PDF, it doesn’t pull up the excerpts I tagged.

Am I misunderstanding how tags within PDFs work?

Is there a way to search specifically for highlights or excerpts that have been tagged in a PDF?

Thanks in advance for any guidance, tips, or advice.