Expanding functi0nality
As with all good open-source communities, Zotero is well-supported, especially when it comes to expanding its capabilities with plugins. Visit www.zotero.org/support/plugins for an exhaustive list, then click the link of one to visit its homepage and download the .xpi file to your Downloads folder. Next, open Zotero and click Tools > Add-ons. Click Settings and choose ‘Install Add-on From File…’ Select your .xpi file and then restart when prompted. Instructions for using the add-on should be found on the plugin’s download page. Plugins worth exploring include Zotero Folder Import for importing a group of files from a single folder while replicating that structure within Zotero under collections. There’s also a Zotero OCR plugin for performing automatic text recognition on PDFs you’ve scanned in. You may also want to consider ZoteroPreview for adding a citation preview tab to items, and Zotero Metadata Import for Calibre for importing (and exporting) metadata between the two. Perhaps the most useful plugin of all is Zutilo, which adds many time-saving tools to Zotero, all accessed via its own context menu. After installation, choose Tools > Zutilo Preferences to configure it and see what’s available (visit https://github.com/wshanks/Zutilo for a detailed description of each). Highlights including copying and pasting multiple fields between items, as well as quickly changing an item type. Finally, you’ll find dozens of plugins for making it easy to integrate Zotero’s citation integration tools with other tools and online services, including WordPress.