
First is that it is not easy to check to see if the documents are being saved correctly, since the title of the document won’t appear. This can be useful if you want to save several documents during a research session and then go back to fill the rest of the information later, but there are two caveats.

The other option is to use the browser plugin to create a record, which will only include the URL to the page you’re on, and fill out the rest of the citation information. One is to keep the desktop version of Zotero open while conducting research and create a new record from scratch whenever you come across a document (such as an opinion, court document, or journal article) that you wish to save. The first option is to add citation information to Zotero manually (see the next section). The notable exception is that Zotero cannot extract document information directly from Westlaw, Lexis, or Bloomberg Law, though it can save documents in those databases as websites.īecause legal scholars and practitioners often do much of their research in proprietary legal databases like Westlaw, Lexis Advance, or Bloomberg Law, it is important to many to find workarounds to use these tools with Zotero. Zotero can sometimes extract metadata from PDFs or Word documents posted on the web, though this depends on the document having the metadata included in the first place. Zotero’s citation extraction tool works with most databases legal scholars use, including MNCat, HeinOnline, LegalTrac, Google Scholar, SSRN, JSTOR, most other academic databases, Amazon, as well as online articles like news stories or blogs.
#Using zotero to capture documents pdf
Clicking the link will save the source to Zotero, including citation information, as well as PDF downloads and screenshots if available. The plugin appears as an icon at the top of the browser that looks like a Z in a new tab, and then takes the form of the detected document type once you navigate to a source, so it will look like a book when on a catalog record or Amazon book page, and an article when looking at a journal article. But this is clearly something a LOT of Zotero users would make use of.Zotero’s browser plugin, called Zotero Connector, is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. I cannot make one because I am not an add-on developer. But to annotate my Zotero snapshots I still have to use Firefox.īottom line: there should be a cross-platform Zotero add-on like PageMark.
#Using zotero to capture documents windows
To compound the problem for me, I have recently migrated from Windows to Mac, and though I've been a loyal Firefox user for years, I'm growing fond of Safari due to its integration with the Apple ecosystem (especially Keychain). Most of them save the annotated page in the cloud somewhere. There are extensions for other browsers that you can use to highlight web pages, but I've not found one yet that lets you save the annotated snapshot locally in the same way that PageMark does. And the fact is, most people don't use Firefox. If there is an extension out there that does this, why should Zotero have one? Well, as far as I can tell, no similar extension exists for any other browser. There should be a Zotero extension to use to do this. With it you can highlight text in the snapshot and attach a note to the highlighted section that stays with the snapshot.


I often annotate Zotero snapshots, then just save the annotated snapshot in the same location Zotero put it in the first place, using a great Firefox add-on called PageMark ( ). I previously suggested a conversion to PDF as a solution for annotating web pages, but my takeaway from the discussions there are that Zotero is more likely to support HTML annotations directly, so I am opening this thread to track this feature as well as collect tips on current workarounds (previous discussion ). Having that said, I also see value (and potentially saved development time) in hooking into an existing tool, so I think either could work as long as the capabilities for annotations and creating notes are similar within the Zotero interface. While there are existing tools such as hypothesis ( ) and memex ( ) to annotate the web which also work to some extent with local files, it would be great to have a local annotated copy of both HTML page snapshots and their annotations (highlights, comments, notes) instead of relying on an online service. text article with images) and being able to view and annotate them in the same manner would be advantageous from a user perspective in my opinion. Although these are technically very different storage formats, they are often similar content-wise (e.g. When I do research, I often find useful material/articles both in the form of PDFs and HTML pages. The PDF annotation features are in the beta preview are fantastic, and it would be super useful to be able to annotate HTML pages in the same interface.
