Zotero 4.0.27, now available, brings some major new features, as well as many other improvements and bug fixes.

Streamlined saving (Zotero for Firefox)

In Zotero for Firefox, it’s now easier than ever to save items from webpages.

Zotero senses information on webpages through bits of code called site translators, which work with most library catalogs, popular websites such as Amazon and the New York Times, and many gated databases.

In the past, there have been two different ways of saving web sources to Zotero:

• If Zotero detected a reference on a webpage, you could click an icon in the address bar — for example, a book icon on Amazon or a journal article icon on a publisher’s site — to save high-quality metadata for the reference to your Zotero library.
• If a site wasn’t supported or a site translator wasn’t working, you could still save any webpage to your Zotero library by clicking the “Create Web Page Item from Current Page” button in the Zotero for Firefox toolbar or by right-clicking on the page background and choosing “Save Page to Zotero”. In such cases, you might need to fill in some details that Zotero couldn’t automatically detect.

In Zotero 4.0.27, we’ve combined the address bar icon and the “Create Web Page Item from Current Page” button into a single save button in the Firefox toolbar, next to the existing Z button for opening the Zotero pane.

The new save button on a New York Times article

You can click the new save button on any webpage to create an item in your Zotero library, and Zotero will automatically use the best available method for saving data. If a translator is available, you’ll get high-quality metadata; if not, you’ll get basic info such as title, access date, and URL, and you can edit the saved item to add additional information from the webpage. The icon will still update to show you what Zotero found on the page, and, as before, you can hover over it to see which translator, if any, will be used.

This also means that a single shortcut key — Cmd+Shift+S (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+S (Windows/Linux) by default — can be used to save from any webpage.

The new save button also features a drop-down menu for accessing additional functionality, such as choosing a non-default translator or looking up a reference in your local (physical) library without even saving it to Zotero.

Additional save options

(This functionality was previously available by right-clicking on the address bar icon, though if you knew that, you surely qualify for some sort of prize.) The new menu will be used for more functionality in the future, so stay tuned.

Prefer another layout? In addition to the new combined toolbar buttons, Zotero provides separate buttons for opening Zotero and saving sources that can be added using Firefox’s Customize mode.

Custom button layout

With the separate buttons, you can hide one or the other button and rely on a keyboard shortcut, move the buttons into the larger Firefox menu panel, or even move the new save button between the address bar and search bar, close to its previous position. (Since the new save button works on every page, it no longer makes sense for it to be within the address bar itself, but by using the separate buttons you can essentially recreate the previous layout.)

While all the above changes apply only to Zotero for Firefox for now, similar changes will come to the Chrome and Safari connectors for Zotero Standalone users in a future version. For now, Zotero Standalone users can continue to use the address bar (Chrome) or toolbar (Safari) icon to save recognized webpages and right-click (control-click on Macs) on the page background and choose “Save Page to Zotero” to save basic info for any other page.

Easier bibliography language selection

Making Zotero accessible to users around the world has always been a priority. Thanks to a global community of volunteers in the Zotero and Citation Style Language (CSL) projects, you can use the Zotero interface and also generate citations in dozens of different languages.

Now, thanks to community developers Rintze Zelle and Aurimas Vinckevicius, it’s much easier to switch between different languages when generating citations.

Previously, Zotero would automatically use the language of the Zotero user interface — generally the language of either Firefox or the operating system — when generating citations. While you’ve always been able to generate citations using a different language, doing so required changing a hidden preference.

You can now set the bibliography language at the same time you choose a citation style, whether you’re using Quick Copy, Create Bibliography from Selected Items, or the word processor plugins.

Choosing a bibliography language for Quick Copy

The new language selector is even more powerful when using the word processor plugins. The bibliography language chosen for a document is stored in the document preferences, allowing you to use different languages in different documents — say, U.S. English for a document you’re submitting to an American journal and Japanese for a paper for a conference in Japan.

Note that, of the thousands of CSL styles that Zotero supports, not all can be localized. If a journal or style guide calls for a specific language, the language drop-down will be disabled and citations will always be generated using the required language. For example, selecting the Nature style will cause Zotero to use the “English (UK)” locale in all cases, as is required by Nature’s style guide.

Other changes

Zotero now offers an “Export Library…” option for group libraries, allowing the full collection hierarchy to be easily exported. If you find yourself facing many sync conflicts, you can now choose to resolve all conflicts with changes from one side or the other. For Zotero Standalone users, we’ve improved support for saving attachments from Chrome and Safari on many sites, bringing site compatibility closer to that of Zotero for Firefox. And we’ve resolved various issues that were preventing complete syncs for some people.

There’s too much else to discuss here, but see the changelog for the full list of changes.

Get it now

If you’re already using Zotero, your copy of Zotero should update to the new version automatically, or you can update manually from the Firefox Add-ons pane or by selecting the “Check for Updates” menu option in Zotero Standalone. If you’re not yet using Zotero, try it out today.

Over the past few weeks, a spate of paid and free Android and iPhone apps have appeared that extend and enrich the Zotero research ecosystem. Here are four of the most exciting mobile applications now available:

Zandy

Scanner for Zotero

BibUp

ZotFile

As amazing as these projects are, the traffic on the Zotero developers mailing list suggests that we can expect even more exciting developments in the near future!

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.

Zotero is now compatible with LibraryThing and CiteULike. Users can now capture bibliographic information from both lists of references and individual items in CiteULike and information about any individual book in their LibraryThing collection. As always, compatibility with new sites and tools brings Zotero closer to its goal of supporting seamless online research. In this case, it is particularly exciting to see closer connections between web tools built for managing books and research materials.

Zotero 1.0.3 is now available. In addition to supporting thirteen more sites and resolving an assortment of bugs with word processor integration, 1.0.3 offers some new features for sharing bibliographies on the web.

It is now easier than ever to insert bibliographic information into blog posts, forum discussions, and web pages. Through Zotero’s export preferences (shown below) you can now include HTML markup in drag and drop bibliographies. To include HTML in your drag and drop bibliographies, all you need to do is check the new “Copy as HTML” box on the export pane of your Zotero preferences.

Beyond adding HTML to style your references, this feature will also embed metadata in COinS with many of the most popular item types. This turns your drag and drop bibliographies into smart bibliographies. Anyone who comes across your references on the web will be able to instantly capture them and add them to their Zotero collections.

From the Preferences pane you can also configure site-specific settings to use specific styles and preferences for different domain paths. Site-specific settings allow you to set different preferences for the different sites you edit. For example you can set a preference to use Wikipedia citation templates automatically at Wikipedia.org, or set it to use MLA style and include HTML for bibliographies that you include on your blog. To add a site-specific setting, click the plus sign at the bottom of the Preferences pane. Then enter the Domain/Path that you want the specific settings applied to and choose your style. If you want to include HTML, then simply check the “Copy as HTML” box.

You can see the full changelog for 1.0.3 here.

We are excited to announce the release of Zotero 1.0.2.

One of the most exciting new features in 1.0.2 is improved support for installing custom citation styles, coupled with the creation of a style repository that includes some fifty new styles, or nearly six times the number of available styles in version 1.0.1. Special thanks to Julian Onions for his contribution of nearly all of these new styles. To add a style, visit the styles page and click Install next to the style you are interested in using.

Zotero 1.0.2 also includes several new site translators, including translators for social media sites Flickr and YouTube. Zotero’s default Open URL resolver has also been changed to the OCLC OpenURL Resolver Gateway, which will allow many Zotero users to automatically find items from their collections in their campus library through the Locate button without editing their preferences.

Zotero 1.0.2 requires new versions of the MS Word and OpenOffice integration plugins.

To see all of the changes, new features and bug fixes, take a look at the full changelog.

Here at Zotero headquarters we are always delighted to support other open projects, and today marks another step closer to seamlessly integrating Zotero into the Open Access web. Zotero is now compatible with all seven Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals. Users can now capture metadata and full-text PDFs from all the PLOS journals.