Zotero best practices

[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.