Supercharge your research in Obsidian with Zotero 7

[@TheOnlyDoctorMek]

This is amazing. Thank you for making this video and including all of the resources that you have. You have made my next 7 years of professional research easier, smoother, and significantly more enjoyable!

[@oliviawessman5621]

8:36 In Zotero, to the right of the Author field(s), you can toggle between Single field (full name) and Two Field (last name, first name). If you select Single field (full name), you can past first and last name in that order one time without having to bother to past first and last name separately.

[@stta7970]

Very well explained. I learned bunch of things , thank you

[@theblacknezuko]

Very well presented and explained! Thank you so much!

[@Aril-w3s]

Bravo!

[@techietoons]

The problem with such a setup is it's not sustainable. While the notes in Obsidian in just file based, and will stay, the Zotero collections often changes or we migrate and things will be lost. I suggest using Literature note for each research paper with pdf attached to the note itself

[@TonyRamella]

I don't see how you would ever lose your reference material in Zotero since it functions similar to Obsidian in that you can actually store all the PDFs and metadata on your local machine. If you mean Zotero might not exist one day, that may be true but since it is open sourced, I am quite confident forks will develop where users can continue importing their libraries to (same with Obsidian). The method you described is essentially what I am doing in this video, the link at the top of the source note takes you directly to the reference material in Zotero. Thanks for watching!

[@techietoons]

@@TonyRamella Did you ever change Zotero collection ?

[@Twinsen_doc]

Hi! Agree, note with pdf is useful, but in Obsidian I didn't find a way to make them together without a link, like in Zotero. My collection subfolders are similar to subfolders in Papers folder in Obsidian, and structure is quite rigid, because in my case they are named after bodyparts (I'm a doctor). I copy every new paper from Zotero to Obsidian, thanks to auto file rename. The author's idea about note naming as citation code is great, I've already faced a problem when I try to find smth, two file names appear if my note is named same as a paper. Today will try to set up a connection.

[@techietoons]

@@Twinsen_doc Hi, let me share my tric k. I create symbolic to link Zotero's storage folder inside Obsidian. This way all PDFs are available inside Obsidian to link. Even in future if you delete local pdf from Zotero to save space using sync, the links will be broken, but when you bring back the pdf, the links will restore. Just keep the name of files consistent.

[@rmt3589]

​@@Twinsen_docHow limited are the file names? I'd just use a prefix or suffix to signify which is which.

[@ProgressivePerspektive]

I followed a long and now have the strong desire to get your templates

[@niklaskras5498]

6:30 perfect i think that was the bug why i read somewhere not to upgrade to zotero 7 so i think imma do that now.

[@AmirFarjam-z2i]

Thank you. Very informative and helpful.

[@JosephHollak]

Maybe a newbie question since I don't use Zotero and I'm new to Obsidian, but are you still using Zotero as an "inbox" for collecting now that the Obsidian community has the web clipper extension for Chrome? In other words, wouldn't the web clipper strategy allow you to skip the Zotero step and get the data/information from around the web that you want saved into Obsidian without another inbox (Zotero) to manage?

[@TonyRamella]

I don't use Web Clipper at all because it very quickly and easily leads to the "collector's fallacy" and creates a big mess of text in my vault. It's a great tool for archiving content, but I personally don't see the benefit in using it for note-making since you still have to process the clippings to write notes from them. Instead I use Zotero to archive reference material and annotations then process my notes from there. This is just my preferred way to manage reference material, if web clipper works fine for you, use that.

[@Gon-h1n]

Really appreciate your video. Can i get the template (md template and CSS, etc)?

[@JosephHollak]

Just for clarification, our 2nd brain vault is a different workflow from your Flow Vault?

[@TonyRamella]

The vault featured in

[@wongsimon2387]

Thanks

[@Skyscore2009]

Hey Tony, thank you for the inspiration! QQ: what do you do in case the author publishes two articles or books in a year? how the system would handle the Citekey in the case?

[@TonyRamella]

Great question! Yes this will happen on occasion. Zotero will just start assigning letters to it. So it will go like this: Smith2024a, Smith2024b, etc. I believe you can change this to numbers in Zotero if needed. On the Obsidian side, you can give the source notes an alias of the article title if you need them to be more searchable.

[@JeffBurke]

Hey Tony! Great info. Question...when I duplicate the formula you've shared for the citation key, the column doesn't update with the new format. Thoughts on what might be driving that behavior? I've restarted Zotero but still no change.

[@JeffBurke]

I figured it out

[@TrentArnold-d7c]

Wondering if updates to your obsidian vault will also be included going forward after buying? Thx.

[@TonyRamella]

@@TrentArnold-d7c yes absolutely. It comes with access to our community where I release all the updates. I would love to have more community contributions to improving it as well.

[@JLF22453]

I am confused about how to set up a template like your Source Notes. How do you pull all that data in automatically from Zotero into the note? I do not know how to set up a note template like that.

[@TonyRamella]

You can search for some Zotero templates on the Obsidian forums, I just formatted it a little differently to fit my workflow and I removed the highlight syncing because it gets too cluttered for me

[@JLF22453]

@ Ty! Your video was very informative.

[@glazyblue8405]

Hi want to ask, why my citation key format is authorTitle? how can i change it

[@laurachaparro2426]

Hey, I think I did something wrong. When you click command+shift+L the red Zotero searching bar appears... I can't manage to get it. Plus when I try to open the command palette it opens Zotero but in the note in Obsidian, it says "no reference found" I'm really frustrated I have tried everything... any advice? I think I did something wrong :(

[@TonyRamella]

That is my fault for not being clear that this is a custom hotkey I assigned to Zotero in my vault. You would have to assign a hotkey to a custom command you create in the Zotero settings under Add Import Format. That is where you assign the source note template. Then you assign a custom hotkey to that command - mine happens to be Cmd + Shift + L. Hope this helps!

[@pariaxb1736]

@@TonyRamella This helped with the Shortcut! I am struggling with a pretty annoying issue on the pop up: on trigger, the pop up will appear, foregrounded, but not focused, which allows no inputs and cant be remedied with a keyboard input (i have to select it with the mouse). I found a setting to have it permanently foregrounded, but nothing on the Autofocus. Any ideas?

[@fabsanh]

Hey Tony, what theme are you using?

[@TonyRamella]

Primary theme. Its awesome

[@HipolitoBraver-b4x]

Mann Track