W
Willem
planned
Slight delay. Temporarily moved to planned
W
Willem
in progress
Hey everyone! We are actively building this now.
First version will most likely be:
- Sync documents from a specific Zotero folder with documents in a Lateral project.
Beyond that what would be most useful for you?
- Sync all of Zotero with Lateral - automatically creating projects and folder
- Syncing notes and highlights between Lateral and Zotero
- Syncing document meta data such as Title, author, journal, etc.
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Ine Lejeune
Willem: first priority is the metadata and second the possibility to select documents to upload from Zotero folders - no automatic upload - this would be creating an overload requiring to sort (I have more than 500 docs in zotero) and it would not be efficient and time consuming losing the benefit from lateral.
E
Eric E
Willem: Very exciting!
I would never use #1 myself (because I have thousands of docs and hundreds of collections), but creating projects for subcollections within a selected collection could be useful.
I can get close to #3 just by allowing Zotero to rename the PDF from the metadata before exporting to Lateral.
Syncing notes and highlights (or even exporting marked-up PDFs for import back to Zotero) is the one thing I can't efficiently do now with Zotero + Zotfile. I have to export from Lateral and then manually create notes, so that's the top priority for me.
In order of preference: 2, 3, 1 (very distant, and as modified above)
A
Amir Soleimani
PDFs directly imported from zotero
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Ine Lejeune
Amir Soleimani: YES very good idea
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Alberto Costa
Amir Soleimani: please do this :)
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Prachi Singh
If I can upvote this implementation would be greatly helpful!
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n d-k
Zotero Sync feature request:
In Zotero, I mark and tag text passages. It would be great if I could import those tags to lateral as concepts and if lateral would collect all the text passages with the same tag under a concept.
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Ine Lejeune
n d-k: this is a good idea - if you can select those documents and then automate the concepts
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Eric E
Zotero Sync feature request: I've been using (and loving) Lateral for grabbing snippets, and now I want to import them back into Zotero as notes. I would assume that a cloud sync would grab the Zotero item ID (for now, I'm just adding it manually in the "Notes" field). What I'm looking to do now is to create a Zotero Note under the item for each Lateral Concept, with each Snippet listed underneath (see screenshot). From the Zotero side, this would compare pretty closely to their "Add note from annotations," which copies highlighted text in a PDF to a Zotero Note.
It would be cool if they could stay in sync, but even just a manual push ("Export to Zotero") would be amazing. And now that I think about it, it could just be a text or markdown file too (added as an attachment) if that's easier. I couldn't find anything about creating notes in the API documentation.
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Willem
Eric E: Amazing thanks for the detailed request Eric! 💫💫 Will try to make it happen! 🙌
W
Willem
under review
hey everyone! great news we are looking to add a Zotero intergration soon. we will be evaluating what is possible and we need your feedback :)
do you use the cloud version of zotero?
T
Tristan Löw
Hey there Willem,
thank you for looking into the integration with Zotero.
I believe the desktop (Mac/PC) version is the most widely used, as it allows for integration with Word.
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Willem
Tristan Löw: thanks Tristan! We want to try to sync Lateral & Zotero and currently looks like using Zotero Cloud may be necessary to allow for this.
For solely the desktop version this may mean we can allow importing and exporting but not syncing. We will explore!
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Eric Zeitler
Willem: I know that there are some webplatforms that do syncing with Zotero while it is open on the desktop. Same with the browser plugins. The cloud functionality of zotero really only benefits keeping zotero synced between devices.
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Eric Zeitler
Willem: You also may want to look at how research rabbit does it's syncing. That may help.
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Willem
Eric Zeitler: thanks Eric that's encouraging to know! does research rabbit sync with the local version? it seemed like it only syncs with the cloud version but will look at it again thanks! 🙌
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Eric Zeitler
Willem: it utilizes your Zotero account I believe to do the sync. But it updates both directions on my desktop version of Zotero which is also connected to my Zotero account so possibly that is why.
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Eric E
Willem: From your social media polls, it seems likely that the majority of folks use the API for sync (and I'm guessing that's low, since you have to do some work to avoid setting up a Zotero account, even if you don't pay for their cloud storage). Anyone who's using the built-in sync feature is using their cloud service.
For non-sync users, I would think that an import would be sufficient. But, if you're really looking to integrate with the client, I'd think it would probably need to be through a browser extension (like the Zotero extensions do). You probably have this, but just in case you hadn't stumbled across it, here's the documentation on that: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/client_coding/connector_http_server
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Willem
Eric Zeitler: Thanks Eric for all your input! 🙏 Would be super useful to know an example of a webplatform that syncs with the desktop version 🚀
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Laure Englebert
Willem: that would be great, actually this is the reason I'm not completely into lateral right now... I would need to shuttle the pdf and citiations/references into Lateral, but what would be even greater it that the changes made in zotero be updated automatically in lateral. If you manage to this I'll upgrade plan ;-). I use mainly the desktop version but I have the cloud sync also. Do you have any idea when this would be operational because I see that the status is under review but so it means that it is far from being planned ?
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Eric E
I've figured out a workaround (Zotero collection > Zotfile > upload to Lateral), but being able to sync directly between a would be great. Syncing the PDFs back with snippets highlighted (or a Zotero Note with snippets for each concept) would be even better!
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J. Hijmans
Eric E: I agree, this would be great!
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JAYROLD ARCEDE
Integrate with Zotero, when will be realize???? Excited here..
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Willem
JAYROLD ARCEDE: hopefully soon! :)
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Aaron Kilfoyle
This would be very helpful. Some of us are "messy" and just throw PDFs into a folder and don't rename them, as Zotero grabs the metatag information... Since I'm one of those people, my zotero library is my main navigation. Ie Problem; identifying specific files to upload into the lateral platform that fit within a project is difficult...
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Alberto Costa
Aaron Kilfoyle: Some problem, thanks to have highlighted it
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