Archive for the 'Features' Category

There are tons of ways to get, books, articles, web pages, and any other kind of item into Zotero. So many, in fact, that we thought we needed this to make this short screencast.  It covers six ways to get things into Zotero. You might just be surprised at how many ways there are to get information into your Zotero library.

Getting Stuff Into Zotero from zotero on Vimeo.

The video covers the following six ways to get things into Zotero:

1. Location Bar Icons: When you visit library websites, journal databases, and many other Zotero enabled sites you can click the icons that appear in the location bar to save citation information in your Zotero library.

2. Create New Item from Current Page button: Clicking the Create New Item from Current Page button in the Zotero toolbar creates a web page item and archives a copy of the page for you to return to later.

3. Retrieve Metadata for PDFs: Zotero can also attempt to identify PDFs you have saved to your computer. Just drag them into the middle column, right click on them and select “Retrieve Metadata for PDF”. If Zotero can find the PDF in Google Scholar, it will add its citation information to your Zotero library.

4. Look up Items by Unique Identifier: If have a DOI, ISBN, or PubMed ID Zotero can look up its citation information.

5. Manually Adding Items: Click the green New Item button in the Zotero toolbar and select the appropriate item type to add a blank item to your library. You can fill in the data in the right column.

6. Importing Records from Other Tools: Many users come to Zotero with extensive collections stored in other reference management software. To import entire collections into Zotero, click on the gear icon and select “Import.” Browse to your file, select it, and click open.

Anyone with a feed reader can now follow public Zotero libraries simply by clicking the feed icon at the right-hand side of the browser address bar. Feeds are generated at the library and collection level, and for group libraries as well as individual libraries.

This feature provides a great way for people both inside and outside the Zotero community to keep track of the latest and greatest additions to libraries and collections, and it will work with any browser and feed reader.

We are excited to announce two major releases. This morning the Zotero team launched both Zotero 1.5 and the first release of Zotero’s web application. Watch the screencast below for details on 1.5 and see the list below for a brief list of Zotero’s new features.

Zotero 1.5 Features

• Automatic synchronization of collections across multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.
• Free automatic backup of your library data at Zotero.org.
• Automatic synchronization of your attachment files to a server of your choice (e.g. iDisk, Jungle Disk, or university-provided web storage).
• Recover recently deleted items with Zotero’s trash can.
• Rich-text notes
  
• New style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats
• Automatic detection of PDF metadata (author, title, etc.)
• Automatic detection and support for proxy servers

New Website Features

• Browse through your library online.
• New user profiles tied to Zotero accounts.
• Preliminary support for following other Zotero users: In the future this will generate a twitter-like feed of users public research activity.
• WYSIWYG CV creator, with the ability to dynamically generate all or part of your CV from Zotero collections.
• Search for friends, colleagues, and other users by institutional affiliation, username, email address, or field of interest.

As the Zotero development community diligently refines Zotero 1.5, we are also starting to break ground on the new Zotero website. To whet your appetite, here is a small taste of what’s to come.

Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview users can now take advantage of preliminary read access to their synced collections from any web browser on any computer, including a version formatted for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. The image to the right is a screenshot of browsing a collection on an iPhone. Just think of the possibilities!

To try this out, you will need to have synced your Zotero 1.5 library to the Zotero server. Then simply visit https://beta.zotero.org and log in to view your library.