JMM’s notes on Zotero

Zotero is free and open-source reference management software. I use it to keep track of academic papers (see /scholar for related scholarly resources).

Add-ons I use

I use a few add-ons to streamline citations, reading papers, and other things.

Better BibTeX

I primarily use Better BibTeX for generating better citation keys in LaTeX. I currently (2024-02-20) don’t use too much LaTeX anymore, but when I did I used it for generating BibTeX bibliographies. I think Better BibTeX is also useful for some of my (X)HTML citations.

Homepage: https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/
Source: https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex

Zotfile

I used Zotfile a lot for organizing the location of my PDFs, and back when I had an e-ink reader I used it to sync PDFs to it.

Homepage: https://zotfile.com/
Source: https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile

zotxt

Zotxt adds an API, which I use to generate citations in Emacs.

Homepage/Source: https://github.com/egh/zotxt

Automatically adding PDFs

Let’s say you have a service (maybe some library access, theoretically) that’s able to get a PDF given an article identifier like, say, a DOI. Like, if you went to some “https://library.example/whateverdoi” it’d get the PDF. Here’s how you’d use that service in Zotero.

Go to Edit > Preferences, in the Advanced tab’s General tab, click the Config Editor button. It’ll warn that it may void the warranty, but continue. Edit “extensions.zotero.findPDFs.resolvers” and set it to something like:

{
    "name":"PDF-Resolver",
    "method":"GET",
    "url":"https://pdf-resolver.example/{doi}",
    "mode":"html",
    "selector":"#pdf",
    "attribute":"src",
    "automatic":true
}