Add item by URL into online Zotero library?

the4thchild
I frequently use school/hospital computers that do not allow installation of any extensions or applications. Is there a way to add a citation directly from a URL in the online Zotero library?

For example, I would want to enter "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/[PMID]" into my Zotero library in the browser (without extension or client) to pull in the title, authors, journal, etc, into a new citation.

Thanks!
David
  • adomasven Zotero Team
    Zotero Bookmarklet should work.
  • the4thchild
    Thanks, that works! On some computers, the system administrator has prevented users from saving bookmarks. Is there a way to run the bookmarklet without saving it as a bookmark?
  • adomasven Zotero Team
    I would highly advise talking to the administrator first - the alternative is very tedious:

    You can right click the "Save to Zotero" button and copy the link address. On the webpage that you want to save to Zotero paste the link into the URL bar and press enter.

    Make sure that the pasted link begins with "javascript:". I.e. it should look like
    javascript:var d=document,s=d.createElement('script');s.src='https://www.zotero.org/bookmarklet/loader.js';(d.body?d.body:d.documentElement).appendChild(s);void(0);
    I tested on Chrome and Firefox and it seems they automatically strip the "javascript:" at the beginning of the link.
  • the4thchild
    Thanks for pointing out the link, including the part about how "javascript:" gets stripped. I had tried copy/pasting the link before and didn't get it to work until manually adding in "javascript:" to the front of the link.

    Looks like the URL stripping is a known issue/intentional design choice in Chrome: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=85232

    I would definitely try to discuss with an administrator if I could. Another partial workaround is to prepend any character to the link and then removing that character that prior hitting Enter so that at least I don't have to write the full "javascript:" each time.

    Is there any thought of entering the URL directly into the Zotero web interface to generate the citation?
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    Is there any thought of entering the URL directly into the Zotero web interface to generate the citation?
    Yes, it's something we plan to support, though no ETA.
  • reitsmar
    It's funny. My first use of Zotero and I immediately run into this. It seems that dstillman's suggestion is the way to go; same as in most PDF readers; Heck, even Word allows import of an image by its URL.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    @reitsmar: I'm not sure what your "this" is. Are you saying you're trying to use Zotero in an environment where you can't install Zotero? Since the above posts, we've added https://www.zotero.org/save, which allows you to save via URL to the online library, but the online library isn't really "Zotero" and isn't meant for any sort of advanced work.

    If you're using the desktop app, then you're just doing it wrong — you want to use the Zotero Connector to save from the browser. There are various technical reasons why saving by URL from either the web or from the Zotero app would necessarily produce worse results than saving from the Zotero Connector in your browser.
  • Calorion
    I’m running into a situation where I need to enter a URL directly into Zotero, as the feature request here suggests: A URL that won’t import properly using the Zotero extension. The URL in question is https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereotype-accuracy-one-largest-and-most-replicable-effects-all; when I click the Zotero icon in Safari, it brings up a dialog where I can import another article entirely, so there’s no easy way I can find to import that one.
  • adamsmith
    Are you not able to right-click/ctrl-click on the Save to Zotero icon in Safari (I never know what features don't work in the Safari extension though I thought this was available)? That'd be the standard way to tell Zotero how to save from a page if the default option (here: add the one item with a DOI from the page) isn't desirable.
  • Calorion
    That never works in Safari, and didn’t work in Firefox when I tried it earlier, but I tried it again in Firefox just now, and it did work. Thanks.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited 2 days ago
    In Safari you just have to right-click on the webpage. Safari doesn't allow creating context-menu options on the button, but the secondary options have always been available.
  • Calorion
    Oh, I forgot about that trick. Thanks for reminding me.
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