If you have other questions, ask via the Discussions tab, or contact me (Lorena) directly.
From a Zotero developer (12/21/2020) "Use any item type (e.g. report or journal article) and put type: article in the "Extra" field. That will be treated by citation styles as a preprint and will turn into a preprint once Zotero adds that category."
3/21/2022 Update: As of Zotero 6.0, Zotero now has a preprint item type
Use html tags, i.e. this word is <b>bolded</b>. It will show as bolded in your bibliography reference (using both the drag-and-drop method and the Word add-on). Zotero can also do other rich text formatting in titles, including subscripts and superscripts and smallcaps.
Highlight the item in My Library and hold down the Control key. The collection(s) it is in will be highlighted in yellow. If you have a Mac, hold down the Option key, and if you are using Linux, use the Alt key . If you want to include subcollections in the search, you will first need to click into the Collections portion of the screen, then press your computer's plus sign (+) key - this will automatically open all subcollections, and then you can follow the previous instructions.
The best way to save your book/article/website/etc titles is in sentence case, with proper nouns, etc. capitalized. If you right-click on the title field (also short title field) in your Zotero library you can switch from title case to sentence case (but you will have to manually capitalize proper nouns, etc). If you then use a citation style that requires title case, Zotero will automatically capitalize all words in the title when you insert the citation.
Use the ultra-cool Reference Extractor Tool!
OCR'd/Indexed PDFs (those that can be searched). Zotero claims it can also search attached .RTF and .TXT files, but I have had problems. I need to re-check this; will report back.
As of March, 2022's update to Zotero 6.0 Yes! See the ChangeLog. However, the new in-Zotero annotations are a layer on the PDF and not part of the PDF. If you want them saved in the PDF, you can via a separate program (i.e. Adobe Acrobat X) and then upload the annotated PDF to Zotero. Zotero will search any notes that are in comment boxes. Remember you can print out a PDF with or without annotations (markups). The tablet programs PaperShip (for iOS only) and ZotFile (which is amazing) let you send a PDF to an app like PDF Expert or iAnnotate, annotate the PDF, then send the annotated version back to your Zotero library as Zotero Notes. ; the PaperShip app also lets you annotate PDFs inside the app ($5 in-app for the full set of tools). 3/22 note - I haven't checked on PaperShip for awhile - I wil do so soonish.
Note: If you used Acrobat Reader or PaperShip to annotate a PDF, Zotero will search/find Text Comments but not Sticky Notes - as a general rule, you can search PDF annotations that can be highlighted, but not those that can only be seen via mouse-over (also, you can see and search more annotations using a standalone PDF reading app than you can viewing a PDF in your browser). Every PDF application seems to be slightly different in terms of kinds of markups can be searched, so do some experimentation!
You can add any file to your Zotero library as an attachment (or as a basic item that has one Note field). However, if you just scanned it, Zotero will not search inside of it - if you scanned it and converted it to an indexed, OCR'd PDF using a program like Adobe Acrobat X or Nitro, you will be able to search inside of the PDF. There are also smartphone apps that you can use to photograph text and convert it to searchable PDFs. Please keep copyright/fair use rules in mind. For more information on how to create PDFs, see the PDFs tab.
I advise doing it over several nights, no more than two hours at a time. For PDFs, drag them from your computer into the Zotero window. Right-click on each one and select "Retrieve metadata for PDF" to see if you got lucky and the article was available in Google Scholar - this will capture bibliographic data from the PDF, create an item from the PDF, and auto-populate bibliographic fields (be sure to check all the bibliographic information - it may be incorrect or incomplete!). For PDFs that are not indexed by Google Scholar, you can open them up and then create an item manually, or do a quick search of the title in a Zotero-compatible database, add the bibliographic info from the database using a translator or DOI, then drag the PDF into the Zotero item.
Even if you do not have a web connection, you will still be able to access your library (which is stored on your computer hard drive) to fix stuff, write notes, open and read PDFs, manually add references, etc. Just open the application, make any changes, then sync when you have a web connection again to update your online Zotero library. Plane trips are a great opportunity to clean up your Zotero library ;-)
If you don't use Zotero's storage, there are some things you will not be able to do via your online library (i.e. view a saved screenshot). For more information on Zotero and webdav servers, see the following links
While I highly recommend using Zotero's own storage, it's not free. I pay $20/year for 2 gigabytes - it simplifies things considerably and supports Zotero. You can use the ZotFile application, or save files to cloud services individually. Also, note this is about saving attached files to cloud storage and establishing links to your Zotero record. Do not store your entire Zotero directory on cloud storage as that will corrupt your files and make a big mess.
If you are moving to a different reference management system, look for the directions on migrating your Zotero account. If you just want to delete the whole thing, you will need to also delete the Zotero standalone application and the bridge extension ion your browser. Before you delete it, go into Preferences and open the Zotero folder - after you delete the program, you can then delete the Zotero folder and all its contents. Just make sure to get anything out of it that you might want, if you are not migrating to a different reference management system!!!!!!!!!!