Zotero 4+

New to app, so far great but room for minor tweaks

Zotero is exactly what every researcher needs, and few (if any) do it better than Zotero. However, on iPadOS, until a few basic tweaks are made, Zotero will not be better than a well-organized iPad files app. - Annotating with an Apple Pencil comes in a few colors, all of which are completely opaque. There is no sense in highlighting anything if you cannot see what has been highlighted. - While editing file information, leaving the app (not closing, leaving) erases all progress made. This is particularly frustrating when trying to fill in information needed for a citation. Forgot what year the article was published, so you went back to the database on safari to check? Too bad, when you come back the title, author, publisher, and everything else has been lost and needs to be entered again. - After a file has been made, you cannot add attachments. This would be useful for articles that come in two PDFs, text and examples.

EDIT: The developers respond to comments and seem to genuinely want to improve the app. And with the number of bugs fixed recently, that is apparent. As bugs continued to be ironed out, this app will be indispensable.

Developer Response ,

- The ink annotation tool is for free-hand writing and drawing on the PDF, which is why it’s opaque. There’s a separate highlight annotation tool for highlighting.

- We can reproduce the bug with edited fields when switching away from the app — we’ll fix.

- You can add standalone attachments to existing items by dragging the attachments on top of the items. If you only have a standalone attachment, you need to add a parent item first, which you can do by holding down on the attachment item.

If you have further questions or bug reports, please post to the Zotero Forums, where we’re best able to help and can fix bugs more quickly.

Such a welcome addition!!

I’ve been using Zotero for years and up until now on iOS I’ve had to use it as a PWA or some wild “Save to Zotero” script bookmark. These options were inefficient in so many ways. (Although I appreciate the effort they made to help out.)

Having an honest to God Zotero app on my phone and iPad is incredible!! There are so many times when I’me using my phone and want to save something I’m researching for later use in a paper or project. Typically I’ve had to resort to some weird way (usually saving the link and then retrieving it later when I’m at my computer).

Now I can FINALLY save things naturally and super easily directly from my phone or iPad with the share feature. The interface is clean, the experience of using the library is intuitive. Thank you so much for getting this out!

A failure to make basic functionality work

I am a scientist, a Zotero beta tester, and a past user of almost all the major reference manager systems. I am providing this one star review because, while I am a firm supporter of Zotero (and open source and open science/academia models), this app has failed to improve basic, core functionality during the entire time I have used it from pre-launch betas to the current version. Basic things like being able to reliably import a reference from a webpage works differently across iOS browsers, often failing completely. Downloading a PDF from a publishers site and uploading is often the last resort solution—but one that fails when you don’t have accesses to the PDF from your current network (i.e. when you have institutional access only via VPN or being on the institutional network). Further, basic problems that are reported to the developers, specific improvements that are technically easy to implement and feature requests simply do not get responded to or integrated. I will continue to use the app as I want to support the Zotero ecosystem (and pay for a plan). But I cannot understand how the most basic aspects of a researchers workflow continue to fail constantly or take forever…

Developer Response ,

We’ve responded to you in the forums — we’re not seeing any of the saving problems that you reported other than with ScienceDirect, which unfortunately uses extreme anti-bot measures that make it harder to support than any other site. We’ll see what we can do.

As for the rest, the app has been under constant development since we launched it. We’ve added all of the most commonly requested features — Add by Identifier, barcode scanning, an eraser tool, a PDF outline view, zotero:// link support — and fixed countless bugs. If there are other things you’d like to see, you should let us know in the forums, but development takes time, and the idea that we haven’t been adding features in response to feedback is just false.