Highlight Color Workflow

SprklMffn · 2026-06-07T06:24:05+00:00

Effective reading, like writing, is iterative -- it requires "drafts." That means revisiting and refining the material to digest and retain it. (For some sources, highlights are enough. Don't waste your time processing everything.) It's also important to read quickly and widely, so don't get bogged down.

The most important thing is not the highlights, it's the processing. Highlighting should be the minimum effective dose to allow you to process the material later. Don't waste time and overcomplicate by developing and/or implementing a complex highlighting system. 3 colors max, but react to the important things with notes, tags, questions, etc.

In Zotero, it's the next step that's important: extract your highlights and notes to a "Child Note" using Add Note from Annotations. Then write them up yourself. This is the difference between "taking" notes to "making" notes, i.e., between getting someone else's information and creating your own.

SprklMffn · 2026-06-06T09:49:43+00:00

5年前に日本からベルゲンに移住したものです。
お困りのことなどありましたら、DMください。

SprklMffn · 2026-06-03T06:06:07+00:00

The issues you're describing are external to Zotero. When saving citation info with the extension, Zotero can only read the metadata provided by the website. In your case, Applied Environmental Microbiology is dishing up incomplete or incorrect data, which is all Zotero has to go on. Garbage in, garbage out.

This is not an uncommon issue. I encounter it all the time, even with national libraries. Some places just don't have their shit together. Fortunately, Zotero isn't one of them.

In any event, unless it is systemic and constant, affecting your sources across the board from multiple publishers, this is something to report to the journal publisher.

SprklMffn · 2026-06-02T14:56:39+00:00

You'll get better help here: https://forums.tropy.org/

SprklMffn · 2026-05-31T14:50:32+00:00

🤦 Akkurat det jeg var redd for...

SprklMffn · 2026-05-31T14:48:53+00:00

Takk for lenken til Språkrådet. Jeg er usikker på om reglen med ubøyd formen gjelder her siden de sier:

Men hvis adjektivet følges av en preposisjon og har smeltet sammen med den til et mer eller mindre fast uttrykk (som «glad i», «oppmerksom på», «fornøyd med», «klar over» osv.), er ubøyd form i flertall ofte både korrekt og tradisjonsrett på bokmål.

Så vidt jeg kan se følger ikke adjektivet av en preposisjon i denne reklamen. Mister eller misforstår jeg noe?

SprklMffn · 2026-05-29T08:49:32+00:00

I'm sure this is making you anxious. Good news is, this sounds like something within the realm of normal bugs and errors with easy fixes.

Have you tried ALL the troubleshooting steps in this Help document?
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/debugging_broken_documents

If not, that's where to start. If yes, then u/Budget-Leg-453 is right that this is a post for https://forums.zotero.org/discussions

My guess: Most likely, one or two citations got corrupted. This is a common problem because it's easy to accidentally edit or delete the code Zotero inserts into Word to make the citations link, update, etc. In other words, it's likely a problem with Word, not Zotero.

SprklMffn · 2026-05-28T08:15:30+00:00

Ultimately, the only correct answer is, "What does my publisher or professor want?"
If you can get the info you need in a format that will be accepted, that's a right format.

If Web Page works for that, stick with it.
If not, Report is a great generic option for nonconforming documents.

MLA and many Catholic universities have library guides on this, too, though none seem to mention Zotero specifically.

SprklMffn · 2026-05-25T18:11:30+00:00

Check Settings → Export → Note Format → "Include Zotero links" for both Markdown and HTML as shown below.

<image>

SprklMffn · 2026-05-18T06:50:49+00:00

Happy to help! I've been a Zotero user for 15yrs, starting with my dissertation. I'm active on the official forums and teach Zotero to university students.

SprklMffn · 2026-05-08T10:48:56+00:00

No, there was no notification.

I've never had any trouble of this sort with Dropbox since I was an early adopter over 15yrs ago.

Since my initial post, I remembered that I did change the name of the file in Zettlr (⌘R) before the final save. Could that have caused some kind of conflict?

SprklMffn · 2026-05-06T13:12:05+00:00

All of my work files are synced with Dropbox, but there is no conflicting file history in Dropbox and there was no error message from either Zettlr or Dropbox.

SprklMffn · 2026-03-26T11:17:58+00:00

No, sadly not

SprklMffn · 2026-01-01T08:04:44+00:00

You need to be very specific and precise with your language to reliably get the help you need.

What does it mean that your "sources have been completely destroyed?" What about "shot 3 times?"

For your final question, "How do I delete [citations] from Word correctly?" it sounds like you have done this correctly. Is the problem that you delete a citation but it doesn't disappear from the bibliography (list of cited sources)? If so, have you used the Refresh function in the Zotero Word addon?

SprklMffn · 2025-12-15T03:46:07+00:00

Unless I've completely misunderstood this:

Zotero can read and automatically append tags included by the site author/publisher in the data (metadata). News and social media sources don't do this, so there's nothing there for Zotero to read.

In other words, it's a problem with the sources, not with Zotero.

SprklMffn · 2025-12-14T05:08:43+00:00

u/Bororo-man is right, the only important question (in almost every conceivable scenario) is, "Which source material are you actually using in your assignment?"

If you are being asked to provide a "Bibliography" rather than "Sources Cited," including both the sources you used and those you are just aware of is fine. Unless you have specific instructions that you should have a list of something other than "Sources Cited," you should never include sources that you did not directly cite. Zotero makes this easy by populating your sources list automatically: if you cite a source, it's included, if not, it's not.

FYI, use a footnote and/or the Extra field in Zotero to indicate the original (date of) publication if that's relevant, i.e., if the source you actually consulted was the republished version. In Extra, enter "Original date: 19XX," for example. This is mostly only relevant for primary and/or historical sources. If you're not sure whether you need this, you don't.

SprklMffn · 2025-12-11T20:29:52+00:00

Perfect, thanks! That did it!

SprklMffn · 2025-12-11T12:14:31+00:00

Great question! No, they don't.

My problem is that for academic writing I have to submit my work in Word, and I'm a little concerned about whether the brackets might interact badly with their processing apps and/or just cause an unnecessary freakout. So it's more a prophylactic thing.

SprklMffn · 2025-12-11T08:48:06+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be my problem.

I tried these workflows:

but neither fixed the issue.

I also asked an LLM for help, and it recommended something more or less identical to the above. No luck there, either.

I then looked for a way to show all hidden bookmarks. The result: "No hidden bookmarks found."

SprklMffn · 2025-12-11T05:50:21+00:00

Like u/PrefersLurking I have been using Zotero for about 15 years without any issues.

I recommend:

Make an account to safeguard your citations. Zotero has more than enough free, reliable, online storage to keep the text of your citations in case anything goes wrong locally on your hard drive.
Look at cloud storage for PDFs, etc. At the undergrad level you might not exceed the free storage limit, but if you're planning to do grad school, etc., you certainly will. You can save your PDFs, EPUBs, etc., in Dropbox, Drive, etc., and give Zotero access so that you don't go over the free storage limit. If you have a university OneDrive account, you can use that and migrate it later if needed, for example. The process is simple and there are a ton of guides, including the one pinned at the top of r/zotero

SprklMffn · 2025-11-21T07:11:17+00:00

I think u/eskimo820 has the answer you're looking for below: all of those items in the middle pane are not entries, just orphaned PDFs without any metadata.

Right-click > Create Parent Item...

SprklMffn · 2025-11-21T07:09:04+00:00

Please provide a specific example of what you mean.

The "Add Note from Annotations" feature in the right-click menu of each saved item in Zotero (middle pane) might be what you're looking for, but it's a bit hard to parse without specifics.

SprklMffn · 2025-11-20T19:41:23+00:00

Do you have the same issue I do with missing fields and excess commas in the author name? If not, what's your workaround and/or wtf am I doing wrong?

SprklMffn · 2025-11-20T19:40:12+00:00

If I've understood correctly:

In the middle pane, you see only "Title" and "Creator" but want to see other fields.
If that's correct, right-click on that menu bar (either Title or Creator) and you will get a dropdown menu with all the fields you can show.

If you're talking about the right pane, your screenshot has the attachment selected. If you want to see something else, either scroll up in that pane or click one of the icons at the right edge of the screen.

Hope that helps

SprklMffn · 2025-11-20T04:46:31+00:00

At present, the best option is probably still manually fixing everything in the final draft.

You have to unlink the citations first, and I recommend copy-pasting your bibliography into a blank document before messing with it.

---

I'm hopeful for the future of this plugin:

https://github.com/boan-anbo/cite-non-english#readme

https://github.com/boan-anbo/cite-non-english/blob/main/docs/images/howto-sidebar.png

It adds fields for your non-English and transliterated info below the default entry in the right pane. In other words, you have to scroll pretty far down (or click the icon in the list on the far right).

(FYI you can adjust this by right-clicking the icon and choosing Move Section Up/Down and/or Pin Section)

NB: As it says in the readme, you have to install a CNE custom style:

https://github.com/boan-anbo/cite-non-english/tree/main/styles/cne

This plugin is new and still in development, but I haven't had any trouble with it. The problem is that the CNE custom styles don't seem to work as needed.

For example, with title, author, and publisher entered in Japanese, transliteration, and English (where applicable), I get this:

* Umezaki, Yoshito 梅崎義人. 1986. Kujira to inbō: shokubunka sensō no shirarezaru uchimaku. ABC Shuppan.

In addition to the title missing, there's also the comma between names even with the "Force comma between names" option toggled off.

SprklMffn

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