A Quick Guide to Zotero 7: Knowledge Management in Genealogy, History and Other Fields: The Genohistory Quick Guide Series, #1

Preface and Acknowledgements

While I wrote this primer to serve my colleagues in the genealogy, history, and genohistory fields, it can be equally valuable to researchers from virtually all disciplines. Welcome, all. I am convinced Zotero is a researcher’s essential companion.

To be concise—essential in a Quick Guide—I limit my acknowledgments to Zotero’s core team. Thank you to its developers and all who run the Corporation for Digital Scholarship. Their work contributes to global knowledge expansion. For individual acknowledgments, see Zotero’s Credits and Acknowledgments[1] page.

1. Introduction to Zotero 7

I discovered Zotero in graduate school when I desperately needed a tool for research and writing in history. I needed a place to store, organize, retrieve, and cite knowledge. I tried many options, including a homegrown Access database and expensive citation management tools that always disappointed me. Then a colleague recommended Zotero. I was skeptical about a free tool, but Zotero surprised me. Seventeen years later, it continues to enhance my effectiveness, efficiency, and creative thinking as a researcher. It even keeps surprising me. Zotero 7 was the best surprise yet.

My goal with this book is to get you started quickly, avoiding the mistakes I made when I began using Zotero so long ago without a guide or teacher. I want to save you time by guiding you through Zotero’s features. For experienced users, I trust this guide will also be valuable. I spent months following the Zotero forums in preparation for this third book on Zotero. And I kept learning new things.

This book can’t cover everything about Zotero, which is constantly evolving. However, within a few hours, you’ll know enough to improve your research skills.

The What and Why of Zotero

Robust and straightforward, Zotero helps you gather, arrange, store, cite, annotate, and collaborate in handling research information. I consider it my knowledge management system. I use it for almost everything I want to recall in professional research, business, and life.

Zotero offers structure and flexibility for managing knowledge, allowing you to turn ideas and information fragments into polished and cohesive output. It combines the structured approach of a citation database with the flexibility of freeform notetaking software like Evernote and OneNote.

As a citation management tool, Zotero supports bibliographic style standards and offers over 10,000 style variations. It streamlines the citation process, saving time and effort. You can create and organize notes, attach or link to various materials, accessing them anywhere with internet service.

With Zotero, you can create voluminous plain or formatted notes that are fully searchable and organized to suit your filing and display preferences. You can attach or link to material in numerous forms—documents of various types, spreadsheets, images, videos, audio files, web pages, and more. You can pull in entire books and articles, mark them up, and access them wherever you have a computer with internet service.

As open-source software, Zotero’s code is accessible and can be supplemented with plugins.[2] This allows for continuous improvement and the addition of new features by developers worldwide.

Changes in Zotero 7

As I put the finishing touches on this book, Zotero 7 has been formally released for only 13 hours. I have had full access to the beta version in progress and have learned much by listening to the forum chatter of the beta testers and developers. While I am doing my best to give you the latest information, by the time you get it, it might have features that are not there yet. Zotero’s development team continually improves the product. Visit the Zotero Version History[3] page regularly to get up-to-date information.

For those familiar with Zotero 6, the most significant changes in Zotero 7 lie in the user interface design, architectural infrastructure, Zotero Reader, and plugins, with many great miscellaneous surprises spread throughout. You may view Zotero’s announcement of the Zotero 7 release at Zotero 7: Zotero, redesigned.[4]

If you have the 32-bit version of Zotero 6 on your computer and use the automated update feature in Zotero’s Help menu to upgrade to Zotero 7, you will probably upgrade to a 32-bit Zotero 7. If you want to upgrade to the 64-bit version (recommended), go to www.zotero.org, and download and install the new version. (See Exercise 1 for details.)

Major User Interface Overhaul

The most noticeable innovation with Zotero 7 will be the redesigned workspace that looks refreshingly modern and has many eagerly awaited features embedded. The changes, while significant, will not require major relearning for current users.

Item Details

The Item Details tabs that once lined the top of the right-most pane have been recast as collapsible sections, with a set of icons down the right edge of the pane. This allows developers to expand functions in future releases, without crowding the interface.

A new header field has been added to the top of the Item Details pane. Bold and eye-catching, you have choices about what you want to appear in it: a Title; the Title, Creator, and Year; or its Bibliography Entry. To select your preference, right-click in the field and choose View As. The sentence casing feature has been improved in this field to eliminate inaccurate capitalization.

In the Creator field, Zotero 7 allows you to Fix Case when the capitalization of a creator’s name is incorrect. You can either right-click on the field or use the ... menu at the end of the field line.

A Libraries and Collections section reveals locations where an item is stored in My Library.

The Attachment Section includes a large thumbnail of images or covers of your PDFs, EPUBs, and HTML snapshots, allowing you to see if you have located the intended document.

Search Capabilities

Zotero 7 includes new search features.

We can search open Zotero Reader tabs by Title and reorder or close them quickly from the search window.

A new search field has been placed in the Collections pane to allow searching for collections in the main workspace, using any term within a collection title.

The Advanced Search feature is now included in the main search menu above the Item List. It includes the new capability of picking columns, as in the Item List.

The Settings can now be full-text or keyword searched.

Accessibility Improvements

Zotero 7 allows dark screen viewing and can follow the choices you have made on your computer regarding screen darkness. It is also available for viewing PDFs and EPUBs.

You may choose a Compact or a Comfortable (looser) layout density to quickly change how much material appears on your monitor.

Keyboard navigation has been improved to promote accessibility.

Greater support has been added for screen readers.

More changes are in the works and will be rolled out in the months ahead, as completed.

Architectural Improvements

The system architecture has changed to modernize and maximize Zotero’s performance, speed, OS compatibility, and PDF and large file handling.

Zotero 7 offers native support for Apple Silicon Macs, 64-bit Windows, and Windows on ARM to provide a seamless operation on new hardware.

These changes lay the groundwork for other future improvements in a rapidly changing technological environment.

Zotero Reader

Zotero 6 included a new PDF Reader—a welcomed improvement. Now called Zotero Reader, it offers much more.

Zotero 7 brings new forms of annotation for PDFs, including ink drawing (formerly only on iOS), underlining, and text boxes. Text boxes can now be resized, expanding all contents as they grow. Highlights and underlines can now span a two-page spread.

Annotation tools (highlights, underlines, and text boxes) are available for EPUB documents and HTML snapshot files. You no longer have to save web pages as an awkwardly formatted PDF to be capable of marking up text. (Use of the snapshot capability will need paid storage—but it is worth the investment for so many reasons.)

Zotero Reader will attempt to extract a table of contents for a document, based on the styles within it. The table of contents will display in the left sidebar of the Zotero Reader, using the second view button on the second toolbar row.

PDFs can be opened in a separate window or in the Zotero Reader. You can set a default behavior in Edit > Settings > General > Reader.

Hovering your cursor over a link will bring up a popup containing the citation or figure.

A document view may be split horizontally or vertically, with both sections being fully functional.

EPUBs and HTML snapshots are now included as Reader options.

The ability to condense individual annotations into a single comprehensive note has been moved into the Reader as a standard tool.

EPUBs with metadata can generate a parent citation item, and Zotero plans soon to make it possible to download EPUBs through the Zotero Connector.

Combined with a plugin called Better Notes (which will be described in a future Quick Guide), the Zotero Reader is a game changer for researchers.

Tabs have been added to allow multiple documents to be opened simultaneously. The tabs can be rearranged and, in the case of many, searched for by clicking the small down arrow at the right end of the tab bar.

Annotations and notes that are extracted using the Reader tools are linked back to their place in a document. If you click on a citation for text extracted from an annotation, the system will jump to the annotation in the attachment.

Third-Party Plugins

The architecture used for third-party developers to integrate plugins that expand Zotero’s capabilities has been remodeled. It will make development easier and more stable across Zotero updates. This has been a major change to existing architecture, and some Zotero 6 plugins will not be available in version 7, if the developer has not been able to make the revisions. Zotero has worked to integrate many of the most widely used functions that are discontinued with the new release. Some plugin developers intend to bring their software up to the new Zotero 7 standard but are not there yet.

Two of the most popular discontinued Zotero 6 plugins are Zotfile and Zutilo. Zotero has replaced much of what Zotfile did with built-in features. A new plugin called Actions and Tags for Zotero replaces much of what Zutilo did and adds much value beyond that.

A new plugin called Add-on Market for Zotero creates a menu of known plugins and allows you to set up automatic updates. If you set up this plugin first, you will not need to download most other plugins from remote sites.[5] It will also let you know which plugins are ready for