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Zotero for Mac: The Built-In PDF Reader

Zotero is a free application that can collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research.

 

Colorful, decorative horizontal line.

 

- INTERACT WITH THE FULL TEXT YOU CAPTURED -

You can highlight text in two ways, create notes, and as the number of captured items grows, use tools to help manage them.  Just double click on any of the tiny PDF icons in a Zotero list to begin using it.  It does not work with HTML full text or with website snapshots.

Video Tutorial (8 minutes, 23 seconds)

Zotero for Mac: Built-In PDF Reader

 

A large screen shot of a PDF article open in Zotero's built-in reader. There are three panels numbered left to right 1-3 whose contents are explained below.

 

PANEL 1

 

- NAVIGATION -

Article Pages

Click the 4 by 4 square of tiny pages to bring up thumbnails of all pages in an article. The thumbnails are clickable.

Clickable thumbnails of the pages in the article let you jump to any page.

 

Your Notes and Highlights

The default view is all of the annotations (notes, highlights) you create for an article. This icon shows a sticky note.

View and search your notes (annotations) and highlights for this article.  Click any item to jump to that part of the article.  Click the three-dot menu to add more text to a note, change an item's color, or delete it.

If you color code your notes and highlights, say green means quote this in my paper and purple means ask my professor about this, you can click a color in this color bar which will appear at the very bottom of the panel to see just the green items or just the purple items, etc.  To go back to viewing everything at once, click all the colors.

Five clickable, tiny different colored squares--yellow, red, green, purple, magenta.

 

Article Outline

The third and last icon in the first panel indicates an outline of an article and clicking on it retrieves a clickable outline of an article if one is available.

A clickable outline of the article allows you to jump to any section of the article.

PANEL 2

 

- INTERACT WITH THE FULL TEXT -

In the middle panel, you can read your article, highlight sections of it in two ways, and create notes.  Choose from 8 colors to color code your highlights and notes if you want.

Hint!

Convert HTML text to PDF format by copying and pasting it into a Word document.  Use the Save As feature to save it as a PDF.  Drag and drop the PDF onto the matching citation in Zotero.  The blue dot will be replaced by a PDF icon.  Double click the icon to open the built-in reader.

Google Docs also works.  After you copy and paste into a Google Doc, go to File - Download - PDF Document.  Drag and drop the PDF as above.

PANEL 3

 

- CREATE TAGS, CONNECT RELATED ITEMS -

The default view is always Info, the article's citation (button highlighted in green below).  Click Tags to view any author-supplied keywords and/or create your own.  Click Related to make a link between items you've captured.

The third panel has two menus. The first one, a "hamburger" menu, underlined in green, defaults to Info, the first button--the citation for an article. There are two more buttons, Tags and Related.

 

- NOTES -

Click the notepad button (highlighted in green below) to view or search your notes, not the highlights, for this article or for all your articles.  You also can add new notes by clicking the plus sign (+).

The second menu in the last panel shows a tiny spiral bound notepad (underlined in green). A search box just for notes you created is at the top followed by notes for the item you are looking at, then a list of all the notes for everything.

Colorful, decorative horizontal line.