You could think of Zotero as a house which you may want to customise to suit your needs. Instead of adding a porch or a swimming pool, this takes the form of plugins that allow you to add features to your reference manager. Our colleague Catherine Brendow takes you on a guided tour.
Add-ons and extensions – an advantage of open source software
The code of open source software like Zotero is public, so tech-savvy people can build tools on top of it. Not all of them are excellent, but some of them are really worth knowing. Their features are sometimes later integrated into the standard version of Zotero, like the cool annotation extraction in Zotero 6 that had previously been available for years in the Zotfile add-on.
These add-ons are usually hosted on GitHub, a platform on which developers can host and manage code. To install them, users need to download a file with an .xpi extension to their computer, then go to the Tools -> Add-ons menu, click on the cogwheel on the right, select Install add-on from file and select the correct file.
Zutilo, Zotero’s Swiss army knife
Zutilo adds many valuable features to Zotero. One of its best features used to be the ability to easily create the reference of a book from the reference of a section of that book and vice versa, but now this is now a standard feature of Zotero. Installing Zutilo can still make your Zotero workflow smoother. For example, when managing tags, you can copy all the tags from one record and paste them into another reference with a single click. Zutilo also lets you select multiple references and mark them as Related. It does not clutter your Zotero menus with features you are not interested in, and you can choose the ones you really want.
Clean and tidy : so many tools!
Let’s not be afraid of clichés, the Swiss love to have everything “propre en ordre”, clean and tidy. I am all for “propre en ordre” Zotero libraries, with robust links, valid and shortened DOIs, without missing or duplicate attachments. Could you use an OCR recognition tool for your attached PDF files? Or would you like to be able to translate those same PDF files quickly and easily? Perhaps you would like to customise the library display, change some of the existing columns or add new ones.
Choose your style!
There are so many styles in the Zotero repository that choosing the right one can be a daunting task. The Style Preview tab is very useful for this: just click on the button on the Cite tab of the Preferences menu, select a reference in your library and click Refresh to see it formatted with all the styles you have in your Zotero. The ZoteroPreview add-on can also make your life easier, especially when you are manually entering an item and want to make sure you have it right: it adds an additional citation preview tab to the right pane of the Zotero Library. You can even copy the citation and paste it elsewhere.
How many citations?
Want to know how many times the articles in your Zotero library have been cited? Several add-ons make it easy for you to find out. One is based on Google Scholar, and the other is on Crossref and Semantic Scholar. In both cases, the number of citations will appear in the “Extra” field of the Zotero record. If you want some qualitative information, Scite is an AI-powered tool that shows how many supporting, challenging or just mentioning citations the article in your library has received. It is freemium, so without a paid subscription, you will only get the basic features (which are already interesting), and it has a Zotero plugin that displays this information directly in your Zotero library.
From citation to note management
With its built-in PDF reader, Zotero 6 makes your workflow smoother. You can highlight and annotate what you read, and extract those annotations to create notes attached to the reference. You can also create standalone notes to store your thoughts. You can tag your notes, link them using the Related feature, and find them using Zotero’s powerful search capabilities.
The Zotero Better Notes plugin helps you to manage your notes even more efficiently. You can create main notes on your key topics, structure them, and organise your notes. You can also export them to Markdown tools like Obsidian.
A comprehensive list of add-ons is available on the Zotero website. You will also find a page with a selection of add-ons on our Zotero libguide, and another presenting bibliometric tools.
Illustration by Ulla Alfons via Pixabay.
Geneva Graduate Institute Library Blog 