Zotero best practices

[kimstacks]

@argentum

Keep in mind that if you annotate your PDFs, Zotfile is also able to extract “pop-up notes”, but not inline notes.

I have tried this but maybe I did something wrong as it does not work for me.

[kimstacks]

@StoltHD

some how can find my documents (that include notes, images and anything between) regardless of what software I have to use (i.e. explorer, notepad, word, obsidian, Zettlr, Scrivener, Cytoscape, Digikam or any other type of software/solutions),

Yea… I am also leaning towards software agnostic system. Convenience at the risk of losing resiliency is not the best tradeoff I now feel.

[kimstacks]

Ok. I am kinda stuck, I guess. I wish there’s a simple enough tutorial I can follow to be better organized.

I have taken a Big 5 before so I know I am bad at organizing a system. Tho I can follow a simple one enough. Hitting deadends is quite the bummer.

[argentum]

Have you tried by installing poppler as recommended here?

[kimstacks]

Well it did say pdf.js is more popular. I will try poppler and then update here

[argentum]

@kimstacks

Can you elaborate a bit more about this strategy? I am still exploring the ideal strategy for how to organize my small library of pdfs. So I am interested in other people’s way of doing things

I’m using wildcards to organize my library. I actually flattened my hierarchy a bit since I last posted. Here are my current settings for Zotfile:

• PDFs for papers get organized by the last name of the first author:
  

  

• I changed the renaming rule to include the citekey, instead of making it a subfolder. This means that my file will be renamed <citekey>-<title of paper> (you can see the example at the very top):
  

  

• My Bibtex settings, in particular my citekey looks like this:
  

  

  What this means is that for a paper by John Doe, published in 2020 at the conference of Cool Zotero Settings (CZS), I’ll get a citekey like this: doe2020czs.

I’m using the citekey as title setting in mdnotes, so the filenames of all the files exported from include doe2020czs. I can then search my harddrive for doe2020czs, and all the files related to this paper will show up. In Obsidian, I try to follow the same naming convention.

This is just the way it works for me, but Zotfile offers a lot of flexibility depending on the wildcards that you use and work for you.

[kimstacks]

@argentum

Have you tried by installing poppler as recommended

I brew install poppler and restarted zotero but still cannot choose poppler in Zotfile Preferences. So

[argentum]

From the screenshot itself, I’m not sure what could be wrong. Sorry, I’m not on MacOS so I can’t really help you debug there since I don’t have much experience with what works there. Not sure what PDF viewer you are using to annotate, but Foxit reader messes it up in Linux. My suggestions would be:

1. The standard have you tried restarting?
2. Try the default PDF viewer if you haven’t already
3. Submit a bug report/ask on the Zotero forums.

[echej]

you could ask on Zotero community forum too

Recent Discussions

[Opi]

Thank you very much, I’ve already been surprised by a link in my reference folder (:

To ensure I use the APA’s 7th edition of referencing style, I tested some references. Then I looked at the differences between Obsidian APA and Zotero’s APA 7th edition, which both seem to use APA’s 6th edition template. Since I am (still) an utter noob with this stuff, I’d thought I’d better ask to be sure.

Does Obsidian APA use the APA’s 7 edition referencing style?

For the sake of learning, I tried to add the [[ ]] in Zotero’s APA 7th edition. The result, Obsidian apa7.css (68.3 KB), seems not to work. Could someone help me understand how to do this properly?

[kimstacks]

Thank you, @StoltHD, @argentum, @echej

This community is nice

I think I will try to draw up diagrams to decide what kind of structure I want. That’s a good suggestion by Stolt

Already there are a few major sections I keep reusing, which are daily notes, papers/books, people, products, projects.

[Archie]

Hey Guys,

i have created a simple Zotero translator that creates a markdown link to your Zotero Item when quick copying (drag and droping) the item into obsidian.

That is wonderful. It works for pdf files, but does nothing when I drag&drop a web Item

[santi]

Hey @linuxule this looks great

@linxule

There you go! copy-link-to-selected-item

can you point me in the right direction on how to set this up, thanks!

[echej]

Check section “Get links to PDF” in this post Zotero best practices or jump directly to description Zotero best practices

[linxule]

Np! basically you can just copy and paste the file into the “translators” folder within the Zotero directory.

On macos, it looks like “/username/Zotero/translators”

[echej]

Sometimes when I use the translator I was getting NaN for the year, even if the year is present in the metadata, for example:
Kosciessa. NaN. Standard multiscale entropy reflects neural dynamics at mismatched temporal scales: What’s signal irregularity got to do with it?

Now I replaced it with the latest translator from github and I am getting also day date Kosciessa. 11-May-2020. Standard multiscale entropy reflects neural dynamics at mismatched temporal scales: What’s signal irregularity got to do with it?

I filled issue on github too

EDIT: The issue was solved really fast <3

[Awy]

Comprehensive Obsidian & Zotero Workflow For Zettelkasten & Evergreen Notes 📝

Have a look at Bryan’s workflow “Comprehensive Obsidian & Zotero Workflow For Zettelkasten & Evergreen Notes ”

He is a great contributor to the community.

[tallguyjenks]

Hey thanks for the plug!

[kamran.soomro]

I haven’t tried this, but I’d imagine you could use Pandoc citations and then use Pandoc coupled with bibtex references to generate fully referenced PDFs. Zotero can export bibtex files.