Zotero

1.1 Windows or macOS or iOS

Easy; use the standard installers.

1.2 Linux

More tedious. retorquere’s repo of deb installers is a simple way for Debian/Ubuntu.

For non-Ubuntu systems… try a packaged version? There is a snap-app package. The weird paths within snaps mean that I must do a lot of configuration to migrate to it if I were not previously using a Snap version. It began to feel like yak shaving to continue and so I did not finish said migration and thus cannot report on it. There is a cross-platform flatpak zotero, which is fine, with the usual caveats about flatpak.

flatpak install flathub org.zotero.Zotero
flatpak override --user --filesystem=/PATH/TO/ZOTEROFOLDER \
    org.zotero.Zotero

All of the above options have been intermittently maintained. For me it has been worth manually installing this app, since I use it all day long and I would like it to work reliably.

cd ~
wget 'https://www.zotero.org/download/client/dl?channel=release&platform=linux-x86_64'
tar -xjf '/home/dan/Downloads/Zotero-5.0.96_linux-x86_64.tar.bz2'
cd ~/Zotero_linux-x86_64/
./set_launcher_icon
ln -s ~/Zotero_linux-x86_64/zotero ~/bin/
ln -s ~/Zotero_linux-x86_64/zotero.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

1.3 Android

See the mobile app section.

1.4 Don’t install; use the web app

There is a web app with some useful features one can use without installing the whole Zotero app: ZoteroBib: Fast, free bibliography generator.

ZoteroBib helps you build a bibliography instantly from any computer or device, without creating an account or installing any software. It’s brought to you by the team behind Zotero, the powerful open-source research tool recommended by thousands of universities worldwide, so you can trust it to help you seamlessly add sources and produce perfect bibliographies. If you need to reuse sources across multiple projects or build a shared research library, we recommend using Zotero instead.

2.1 Syncing files to mobile

Given none of the contenders seem, at a glance, good, I prefer no client at all. I have used the Zotero plugin zotfile to synchronise a folder full of attachments to my tablet. It’s not perfect, but it’s easy and robust, and many apps exist to browse a folder of PDFs. NB Zotfile is discontinued and will eventually stop working. Maybe it can be replaced by retorquere/zotero-opds which would sync via OPDS. Hmm, that seems to have stalled. Watch this space for updates (e.g. MuiseDestiny/zotero-file, a reimplementation.).

Settings Note: I use zotero rename; formerly I used the rename string {%av}{%y }{%t}.

3.1 Citation keys

The biggest trick is that BBT makes sensible, user-accessible citation keys for my references, and if I use these consistently to refer to my sources, life will go well for me.

The citation keys are generated magically by a format string. (Of course, there is no guarantee my colleagues will agree on a sensible standard for citation keys, but that problem is perennial.)

My citation key format strings for BibTeX in the old syntax (there is a new syntax; I need to migrate)

[Auth:fold:nopunctordash][year][title:fold:nopunctordash:capitalize:skipwords:select,1,1]

TODO: check out this handles diacritical marks.

So. Say I would like to cite the classic

Ingrid Daubechies (1988) Orthonormal bases of compactly supported wavelets. Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 41(7), 909—996. DOI.

Those cite key formulae above will all ensure that I can refer to this work as Daubechies1988Orthonormal. I could then cite it in LaTeX as \cite{Daubechies1988Orthonormal}, in markdown as \@Daubechies1988Orthonormal and presumably in other systems using some other syntax.

3.2 Exporting BibTeX files via BBT

See also URL export of a BibTeX file.

Zotero will also generate the necessary bibliography databases for any given folder (e.g. .bib file) and optionally keep that file updated as I add more articles to Zotero. That is a nifty magical feature but I found it easier to write my own script to do this on my own schedule rather than relying on magic.

I am fond of excluding following BibLaTeX fields from export to keep outputs small and dense.

file,abstract,note,keywords,lccn,annotation,issn,copyright,howpublished,primaryclass,langid,license,eprintclass,urldate,shortjournal,source,title-short

BBT supports HTTP-pull export, meaning that accessing an up-to-date bib file is a matter of an HTTP request. e.g. http://127.0.0.1:23119/better-bibtex/collection?/1/citation_management.biblatex pulls all the records in the citation_management collection and this works from my local copy of Zotero, so it’s fast and reliable compared to the cloud Zotero server API, which depends upon my internet connection etc. I use this feature all the time, mostly to handle referencing in this very blog that you are now reading. In fact, I automated it with a custom BibTeX export script.

The pull export works better if for me if I set the advanced preference extensions.zotero.translators.better-bibtex.sorted to be true so that the reference sorting is consistent, otherwise it seems to be random each time fine as it is, these days.

Recently I have noticed that exporting as yaml rather than bib is more consistent across platforms for some reason, so I have been using that as the canonical storage format. Either format works fine for blogdown, which is what this blog uses.

spicy aside: CSL is close to being good for use on websites, but has a flaw: They do not support links, in the sense that there is no general way in the standard to tell a CSL renderer where to anchor a hyperlink, how to style it etc. There is a hack that may support some use cases, although it is not ideal for mine. This is not to say links are impossible; merely that CSL regards the web as a second-class participant in world of information and affords it merely clunky second-class support. If I want something different than the fairly ugly default, I need to write my own CSL processor with some idiosyncratic, site-specific custom URL handling built in, which presupposes I have access to the source code of whatever tool I use and would like to spend time maintaining a fork of it.

I interpret this to mean that the creators of CSL imagine that we are only using it for writing stuff to be printed out on paper, and that it is not worth introducing any conveniences for the mere passing fad that is internet-based communication. This feels reactionary — I literally have not seen a paper journal for years now — but I guess that really nice paper citations is what these passionate volunteers have identified as the first stop on their journey. I choose jump out and swim the last mile to the beach alone rather than spending any more time lobbying to change the destination of this ship.

At the moment, the citations on this blog look OK, IMO.

3.3 Interactive citation finding

BBT supports a Cite-as-you-write interaction, in the form of a GUI popup citation finder for generic editors. I do not use this because I export my citations to a BibLaTeX file on disk using HTTP-pull (below) and my editors already support smart citation natively for BibLaTeX files on disk.

citr provides an interactive citation finder for RStudio that works with BetterBibTeX.

install.packages("citr")

I do not use it because I do not like RStudio.

There is a new citation processor, citeproc-rs in recent Zotero. Evaluation TBD.

4.1 Use an existing folder of PDFs

Integrate with an existing folder of PDFs? Do not wish to use Zotero’s storage system? Richard Zach points out

… you keep your PDF directory synced across computers (e.g., if it lives in your Dropbox), linking the PDFs is just as good. If you add a PDF, Zotero will look up the metadata for you and add a reference to your database.

I did this for a few years. Plus: this is cheaper than their Zotero cloud service storage. Minus: it will not sync to the Zotero web app or mobile app.

See also Ilya Kashnitsky, Zotero hacks: unlimited synced storage and its smooth use with rmarkdown.

4.2 Quick copy shortcut breaks

Occasionally (for me, frequently) the Quick copy keyboard shortcut breaks. Per default this is Ctrl-Shift-C. This should be fixed by restarting Zotero. Nerds can enter the following in the developer console:

await Zotero.Translators.reinit()

It does not solve a related problem which arises on Ubuntu 20.04 where Ctrl-Shift-C just seems a contentious key combination to use and does weird stuff which is never what I want. It launches a terminal in VS Code, even though I disabled that shortcut, it never does anything in Zotero. Since this is only bad enough to annoy me but not so crippling as to be worth going down a rabbit hole of GNOME keyboard shortcut debugging, I will not investigate this further. I reassigned it to a different key, Ctrl-Shift-B, and it seems to work better so far.

4.3 Why are my dates in USA format?

On macOS Zotero is sometimes sycophantically eager to use the American date system despite the fact that US English is nowhere in my localization preferences. This makes me look like I think there are 31 months in the year if I use it in Australia. The following settings I found on the user forum seem to help:

intl.regional_prefs.use_os_locales: true
intl.locale.requested: en-GB
intl.accept_languages: en-GB, en

4.4 URL export

Zotero exposes URLs for public groups that I can e.g. include in overleaf documents.

The zotero url trick was proposed by one christian_moedrup_legaard on this page

HT Laurence Davies.

5.1 Server side

The server side of Zotero has an internet-facing Web API. Its virtues are that

1. I can use my language of choice, not just javascript, to do things and
2. it is simple; there is no messing about with the complicated build chain of javascript apps.

However, it is

1. slow,
2. limited, and
3. does not have access to the UI, just the server-side data.

Nonetheless, it is an easy way to get certain stuff done, such as mass updating of tags or spelling or whatever. I use it for data-cleaning, e.g. I have a script which walks through the collection, looks for suspect citation ids and deletes them.

I am currently writing a new script to sync tags and collections to be the same (i.e. putting an article in a collection called gp_regression will also tag it with gp_regression). My justification is that the UI for each is deficient but in different ways: e.g. I can’t search for articles by intersection using folder (i.e. being in 2 folders) but I can with tags. On the other hand actually assigning tags to things is gruelling because their UI requires way too much dragging and dropping of tiny little widgets. Zotero 7 makes it easier to view other collections a given article is in, which is half the battle.

5.2 Client side

The client has a Javascript API, as it is essentially a javascript app. I could use this to develop plugins and such. But actually, I don’t have time to, because this is yak shaving.

Mini-trick: I can execute javascript manually for one-off processes, e.g. batch editing.

I was briefly trying to use the client API to write a custom exporter for Zotero. I did not finish because BetterBibTex does what I wanted.

Nonetheless, if I did want to reinvent a wheel, or even do something new, here are overview docs, detail docs, and all the code.

One problem I had when last I tried this was writing output formats which need a unique citekey reference to the items in the bibliography. Here is a simple example which deals with that citekey issue (albeit with an outdated version of the citekey system) Here is a soothing walk-through of the whole process. Once again, BBT solves that problem, so I will spend no more thought on it.

6.1 Via BetterBibTeX and blogdown

See BetterBibTex export.

6.2 Zotero-mdnotes

Zotero-mdnotes is

A Zotero plugin to export item metadata and notes as markdown files.

Possibly a competitor, the more featureful windingwind/zotero-better-notes

6.3 Via CSL

CSL is a citation rendering mini-language used by modern journals and software to express house style. And I can use it too.

This is a slightly weird way to get plain-text citations out; CSL is a system for instructing citation software how to render citations in a rich-text word processor; but it can be forced to pump out plain text or markdown. It is robust and simple. There is a CSL editor online so this is easy-ish. One catch is that you might, like me, wish to get my BibTeX citation keys out to refer to them. But Bibtex keys are not accessible to CSL, so this doesn’t work. AFAICT this is built into the CSL spec.

CSL has a citation-label variable, but it doesn’t correspond to the bibtex keys generated by BBT, which is unsatisfactory.

• Here is my docutils/ReST style file, restructuredtext.csl, which renders citations as plain text with ReST markup, including anchor links.

  It’s ugly, because it has to battle with a grumpy rich-text XML infrastructure to render plain text, but it gets the job done without any coding, and is robust against software changes.

• Similarly, here is my Markdown style file, markdown.csl, which, likewise, renders citations as plain text with Markdown markup, including anchor links.

• Emiliano Heyns has a BibTeX key CSL hack, which renders Emiliano’s particular preferred citekey \{LeDT06} by reimplementing the BibTeX key generation (sadly not quite matching mine.)

6.4 Dynamic bibliography generation in situ

Erik Hetzner’s zotxt can avoid the need to create bibfiles, rendering bibliographies directly by querying the Zotero app, rather than rendering an intermediate file. I do not mind keeping the intermediate file around because it is shareable, so I have not pursued this.