Zotero
Desiderata
DONE Automatically index any PDFs downloaded into my paper stash.
- Method 1: Download them via the browser extension to another directory then copy them onto the personal paper stash later in bulk e.g. weekly.
DONE Work across multiple devices seamlessly.
DONE Produce a global .bib file that syncs with my emacs directory.
TODO Create separate .bib file for references cited in org-roam documents.
DONE Ability to put multiple tabs/group papers into multiple collections.
- Tags for groups whose elements will overlap e.g. Causal Discovery, Calibration etc., and Collections for hierarchical grouping - for now they are Reading, To read, To file, Backlog.
TODO Avoid saving Abstracts in .bib file as they take up a lot of space.
Workflow
- Papers in the process of reading/need to be read asap are to be filed by the Reading collection.
- After reading a paper with highlights, put it under the To file collection.
- Make an org-roam note for papers under To file, and then put them to the Filed collection.
- To share highlighted PDF, go to
File -> Export PDFwithin the main menu.
Plugins
Better BibTeX Remove the abstract field when exporting the .bib file, which can save space considerably. Sort the entries by item creation order. Citation key format is:
auth.lower + '-' + shorttitle(1,0).lower + '-' + year
- ZotFile. See new features introduced in Zotero 7 for some features of ZotFile.
- zotmoov - Zotero 7 compliant replacement for ZotFile.
Filename template is:
{{ firstCreator suffix="-" replaceFrom="\s+and\s+|\." replaceTo="-" }}{{ year suffix="-" }}{{ title truncate="100" }}
Issues
- After saving papers to Zotero via the browser, and saving it on the default local directory, and then manually saving the pdf in the personal stash, I dragged the PDFs from the personal stash to Zotero, and this changed the name of the files in the personal stash to Author, Date, Paper name format.
- After creating proper entries for pdf files which were not indexed previously, these proper entries do not appear on other devices - problem was fixed after restarting Zotero in the device where proper entries were created.
Resources
- How to link pdfs to cloud storage.
- zotero server - use Zotero translation server to import records without running the Zotero client.
- zotra-cli - CLI wrapper around Zotero server that also gets attachment URLs when possible.
- How to have an up-to-date global bibliography with Zotero.