Display relevant Zotero items / live-updating zotero query

What this would look like:

I type some sort of ‘zotero-query’ code with a specific keyword, or a collection link, and have Obsidian display the results inside the note, each entry with a clickable link that takes you to that paper in zotero.

This could take advantage of a live updated exported .bib library (available in the zotero file menu)

So let’s say I have a note called “oceanic boundlessness,” I have all my own notes but in addition I could add a section (similar to dataview) that displays all the entries in my zotero library for that term. Alternatively, it could use links to live-updated zotero collections (although this would be less ideal).

You may say “why not just add a link to the collection and follow it to the zotero window?” Well, I already do this, and it’s been great, but the reason is very simply to have this information available at a glance. This way, it would not require a motivated behavior, in other words, it does not rely on my explicitly thinking that I should look into this topic some more, and instead I could just scroll and get a quick idea of whether there’s anything interesting to look at.

Given that I have a massive library, this would be a very cool way to discover research I have shelved or not read, or need to re-read, given that I’m currently writing notes on the topic.

I think it can be done using Dataview + one of the existing Zotero plugins, e.g. ZotLit, if you want to search/query only metadata such as author, tags, journals. …

Or do you want to search the content of pdf? If so, it will need more than what I said.

A good idea to have data automatically imported. I think so too, the data should be accessed from Zotero db via Zotlit companion plugin. The other way is to use QuickAdd macro. I managed to do a macros, but did not reach any success. Recently I have seen the post by @Feralflora who had done this job.

1 Like