Coming less than three months after Zotero 8, Zotero 9 is the first major update since we announced a faster release cycle for Zotero, and it represents our commitment to getting stable features into the hands of users more quickly.

Read Aloud

Read Aloud reads your documents to you in high-quality, natural-sounding voices. It works on PDFs, EPUBs, and webpage snapshots.

To get started, just click the headphones button in Zotero’s reader toolbar.

As you’re listening, you can skip forward or backward by paragraph or by sentence (Option/Alt-click or Option/Alt-left/right), and you can start reading from a particular point by clicking in the left margin or by right-clicking and choosing “Read Aloud from Here”.

An “Annotate Sentence” button — or H or U on your keyboard — will automatically highlight or underline the last sentence you heard, and you can use shortcut keys to quickly move, expand, or delete the new annotation.

Your last reading position is saved and synced between devices, so you can pick up where you left off on any device.

Read Aloud requires an internet connection and a Zotero account for high-quality voices, which we’re calling Zotero Voices. If you’d like to use Read Aloud offline, you can still use the text-to-speech voices available on your system, but the quality will be significantly degraded.

We offer two tiers of Zotero Voices: Standard and Premium. Standard voices are generated on Zotero servers, with unlimited minutes for Zotero Storage subscribers and 2 hours/month for free accounts. Premium voices are the highest-quality voices available, processed by external text-to-speech providers — they make fewer mistakes, sound more natural, support many more languages, and can handle multilingual text. Individual Zotero Storage subscribers will receive up to 2 hours of Premium usage (varying by voice) each month, and free and institutional accounts will also receive a small quota in order to try the voices out. Initially, all subscribers can request additional Premium minutes for free. In the near future, we’ll provide more details on monthly allocations and options for adding additional minutes going forward.

Read Aloud is currently available only in the desktop app, but it’ll be coming to the iOS and Android apps soon.

Recently Read

A new Recently Read collection at the top of the collections list in each library shows items with attachments you’ve recently read, most recent first. Opening an attachment or changing pages will bump the item to the top of the list.

The collection includes a Last Read column, which you can also add to other views, and “Attachment Last Read” is available as an Advanced Search condition.

The last-read time syncs between devices, so you can quickly find a file on another device that you’ve read elsewhere.

Insert Annotations Directly into Word Processor Documents

The word processor plugins now feature a new Add Annotation button that lets you insert one or more annotations directly into your document, with active Zotero citations that automatically generate bibliography entries.

Previously, you could add annotations to Zotero notes and insert notes into your document with active citations, but it’s no longer necessary to create an intermediate note if you prefer to work directly in your word processor.

Add Annotation opens a new mode in the citation dialog that expands attachments to show individual annotations. You can browse or search for annotations, choose one or more, and then add them to your document, along with active citations and any comments you added. Image and ink annotations are inserted as images.

“Added By” and “Modified By” for Group Libraries

You can now add “Added By” and “Modified By” columns to the items list in group libraries, letting you see and sort by the people who created and last updated items.

These fields also show in the metadata list along with Date Added/Modified.

Per-Group File Renaming Settings

Group admins can now configure file-renaming settings for each group library, ensuring consistent filenames for all group members.

Performance Improvements

We’ve made some major improvements to Zotero’s performance, including reducing startup memory usage by 20% and drastically reducing disk access and network requests during file syncing in some situations.

On macOS, Zotero now uses a feature of the modern Apple filesystem to avoid additional disk-space usage when copying files. This includes the automatic daily backups Zotero makes of its database, potentially saving hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes of local disk space.

Web-Based Login

You now log in to your Zotero account via the browser instead of entering credentials in the app. This allows you to use a password manager to auto-fill credentials and will enable two-factor authentication (currently in beta), greatly increasing the security of your Zotero account.

Other Improvements

See the changelog for the full list of changes.

Get Zotero 9

If you’re already running Zotero, you can upgrade from within Zotero by going to Help → “Check for Updates…”.

Don’t yet have Zotero? Download Zotero 9 now.

Going forward, we’ll be changing how we manage Zotero releases, with the goal of getting stable features out to all users more quickly.

Instead of waiting months for a large update, we plan to release new versions of Zotero on a regular, rapid schedule, roughly every 6–10 weeks. These releases (Zotero 9, Zotero 10, and so on) will include new features and improvements that are ready for general use.

Between these feature releases, all changes will continue to appear immediately in the Zotero Beta, and we’ll periodically publish maintenance updates (such as Zotero 8.0.1) that include only bug fixes and small refinements to recently released features.

For Zotero users, this means:

• New features will reach everyone sooner
• Bug fixes are less likely to be tied to major releases
• Updates will be smaller and more predictable

If you’ve been running the Zotero Beta mainly to get early access to new features, but aren’t interested in running beta software or reporting issues in the Zotero Forums, we recommend switching to the regular release version of Zotero from the download page. With more frequent releases, you won’t need to wait long to get new functionality.

Redesigned Citation Dialog

Zotero 8 introduces a new unified citation dialog, replacing the previous citation dialog (the “red bar”), the “classic” citation dialog, and the Add Note dialog (the “yellow bar”).

The new dialog has two modes: List mode and Library mode. List mode lets you quickly search for citations from across your Zotero libraries by title, creator, and year. Library mode includes a library browser, letting you find items in specific libraries or collections. You can switch between the two modes with a single click, preserving any added items or entered search terms. By default, it will open in the last mode you used, but you can choose a different default mode in the settings.

In Zotero 7, we added the ability to quickly add citations for selected items and open documents. In the new dialog, these options are available in both List mode and Library mode, so you can make these quick selections even if you otherwise prefer to add items via the library browser.

As before, once you’ve selected an item, you can click on its bubble to customize the citation with a page number, prefix, etc. It’s also now possible to add any locator — not just a page number — right from the search bar by typing the full or short name (e.g., “line 10” or “l. 10” after the citation and pressing Enter/Return.

You can switch between adding citations and adding notes using buttons in the bottom left, corresponding to the Add/Edit Citation and Add Note buttons in your word processor.

(For those coming from the classic dialog, note that there’s no text field to make manual edits to citations. It’s been possible to edit citations directly in the document for many years, which is why the red bar didn’t include such a text field either. More importantly, though, such manual edits should be avoided in almost all cases. Instead, customize the citation via the citation dialog, which will allow Zotero to continue to update the citation as necessary.)

Annotations in the Items List

Annotations you make on PDFs, EPUBs, and webpage snapshots now show up under their parent attachments in the items list.

Showing annotations in the items list makes it easier to view annotations across a library or collection, and it also makes it possible to search for annotations directly. For example, you can search for all annotations in a collection with a given tag and then create a note from those annotations or copy them to an external text editor with Quick Copy.

In Advanced Search, you can use “Item Type” “is” “Annotation” to match annotations or use the Annotation Text and Annotation Comment search conditions to search for specific parts of the annotation.

You can assign tags to selected annotations by dragging them to the tag selector, just like other items.

Selected annotations show up in the item pane, grouped by top-level item.

Reader Appearance Panel with Theme Support

We’ve added a new Appearance panel in the reader that provides quick access to view settings and introduces support for reader themes.

The view settings are per-document settings. Themes are applied globally for all documents, including in the attachment preview in the item pane, and apply to PDFs, EPUBs, and webpage snapshots.

We offer a number of built-in themes (“Dark”, “Snow”, “Sepia”), and you can create custom themes just by specifying a foreground and background color. (Some other theme engines require additional accent colors, but we’ve tried to make this as simple as possible for users by automatically adjusting other colors based on the foreground and background colors.) You can set a different theme that applies to light mode and dark mode.

The themes replace the previous on-by-default “Use Dark Mode for Content” option, which inverted images in dark mode. We’re now simply darkening images a bit when using a dark theme. Images and ink annotations in the reader sidebar and note editor are now only darkened as well (and only when Zotero itself is in dark mode).

When possible, we also try to apply themes to PDF pages containing full-page images, such as scanned papers, by replacing whitish/dark colors with theme colors. (Otherwise we simply darken the page slightly.)

Note Tabs

It’s now possible to open notes in tabs in addition to separate windows. Note tabs fill the whole window, with wide margins for better readability and a clean, distraction-free space for note-taking.

By default, double-clicking a note in the items list will open it in a tab. You can choose to open the note in the other space from the context menu, and you can change the default behavior using the “Open notes in new windows instead of tabs” setting in the General pane of the settings.

Notes in tabs have a separate font size setting in the View menu.

Reading Mode for Webpage Snapshots

Reading Mode reformats webpage snapshots for easier reading, with unnecessary page elements removed. You can adjust line height and other view options from the Appearance panel.

Improved Tabs Menu

We’ve reworked the tabs menu to make it faster to interact with via the keyboard.

You can now press Ctrl/Cmd-; to bring up the menu at any time.

Once the menu is open, it simultaneously accepts search input, up/down navigation, and row selection, without the need to move between different parts of the menu. You can simply start typing the name of an open tab and then press Enter/Return to switch to it once you’ve narrowed down the list.

It’s also possible to quickly close multiple tabs by moving between the row close buttons with up/down and pressing space bar to close a tab.

Continuous File Renaming

Zotero now automatically keeps attachment filenames in sync with parent item metadata as you make changes (e.g., changing the title). In previous versions, while Zotero would automatically rename files when you first added them to your library, if you later edited the item’s metadata, you would need to right-click on the attachment and select “Rename File from Parent Metadata”.

You can configure which file types renaming applies to from the General tab of the Zotero settings.

After upgrading to this version, existing eligible files that don’t match the current filename format won’t be automatically renamed, but you can choose to rename them en masse from the Zotero settings. Zotero will also prompt you to rename all files if you change the filename format.

“Rename File from Parent Metadata” has been removed from the item context menu. If a filename doesn’t match the configured filename format (e.g., because automatic renaming is disabled or you changed the format but didn’t choose to rename all files), you can click the “Rename File to Match Parent Item” button next to the filename in the attachment’s item pane to rename it.

New Attachment Title Options

Zotero 7 introduced more consistent handling of attachment titles, preserving simpler, less-redundant titles (e.g., “Full Text PDF” or “Preprint PDF”) in cases where the title was previously changed to match the filename. Zotero 8 further refines its renaming and titling logic when adding multiple and/or non-primary attachments, to bring the functionality better in line with the intended behavior.

We’ve also added a “Normalize Attachment Titles” option under Tools → Manage Attachments to update old primary attachments with titles matching the filename to use simpler titles such as “PDF”.

While we recommend the default behavior, allowing Zotero to rename primary files and keep them renamed while using simpler titles in the items list, if you really prefer to view filenames instead of titles, you can now enable “Show attachment filenames in the items list” option in the General pane of the settings.

ARM Linux Support

Zotero 8 adds a version for Linux running on ARM64 devices. This includes ARM-based Chromebooks, Apple Silicon Macs running Linux (Linux VMs, Asahi Linux), and Raspberry Pis.

If you’ve been unable to run Zotero on your ARM-based device, or you’ve been running the x86_64 version under emulation, give it a try.

User Interface Improvements

We’ve made a number of changes across the interface to address common requests:

• A new button in the library tab allows you to quickly close the item pane without dragging its edge or using the menus.
• You can reorder item pane sections by dragging their icons in the side navigation bar.
• You can drag items, collections, and searches into the trash.
• You can drag attachments, notes, and related items from the item pane (e.g., to copy files to the filesystem or use Quick Copy).
• Collections automatically expand when you drag over them, making it easier to drop collections or items into subcollections.
• You can delete attachments from the item pane.
• Tabs maintain their size as you close them for faster closing of multiple tabs.

Tag Autocomplete and Note Field in Zotero Connector

With Zotero 8, the Zotero Connector save popup can autocomplete tags in your Zotero library and allows you to add a note to items as you save them.

And Much More

Zotero 8 includes much more than we can list here. See the changelog for additional details.

System Requirements

Zotero 8 requires macOS 10.15 or later, Windows 10 or later, or a Firefox 140–compatible Linux system.

Faster Future Releases

Going forward, we’re changing how we put out Zotero releases. Read about Zotero’s new release schedule.

Get Zotero 8

If you’re already running Zotero, you can upgrade from within Zotero by going to Help → “Check for Updates…”.

Don’t yet have Zotero? Download Zotero 8 now.

EPUB and webpage snapshot annotation

Zotero 7 added the ability to view and annotate EPUBs and webpage snapshots, and it’s now possible in Zotero for iOS as well. You can add highlights, underlines, and sticky notes to EPUBs and snapshots and seamlessly sync those annotations with Zotero on your computer.

EPUBs and webpage snapshots are particularly well suited to mobile devices because of their ability to reflow text based on screen size and orientation, and some publishers now offer EPUBs as alternatives to PDFs. Zotero will still automatically download PDFs rather than EPUBs from most sites, but we’ll be providing a way to choose a preferred attachment format in a future version.

PDF metadata retrieval

Zotero for iOS can also now automatically retrieve bibliographic details for standalone PDFs shared with the app from your browser or other apps or added directly from within the app. We still recommend sharing an article page from the browser when possible and allowing the app to automatically download the available PDF, but when that’s not an option, you can save a PDF directly and let the app attempt to create a parent item without needing to run Retrieve Metadata back on the desktop.

Zotero for Android lets you work with your Zotero data no matter where you are:

• Sync your personal and group libraries
• View and edit item details
• Organize items into collections
• Take notes on your research
• Read PDFs and add highlight, note, image, and ink annotations (EPUB/snapshot support coming soon)
• Save journal articles, newspaper articles, books, webpages, and more by sharing a URL from your browser or other apps
• Automatically download article PDFs to read (currently limited to PDFs accessible without a login due to Android limitations)
• Add items by DOI, ISBN, PMID, or other identifiers
• Automatically retrieve bibliographic details for PDFs saved directly to the app
• Quickly add physical books to your Zotero library by scanning book barcodes with your device camera

Back on your computer, you can add the PDF annotations you’ve made on your Android device to Zotero notes and insert those notes into your word processor document with active Zotero citations or export them to Markdown.

Please post to the Zotero Forums with any bug reports or feature requests. Be sure to mention “Android” in your thread title.

Get Zotero for Android on the Google Play Store

A Major Redesign

Zotero 7 introduces a beautiful, modern design that will still feel familiar to long-time Zotero users.

New Item Pane

As part of the redesign, we’ve taken the opportunity to rethink some core elements of Zotero. One of the most important changes is in the item pane, where we’ve replaced the horizontal tabs (Info, Tags, Notes, etc.) with collapsible vertical sections and a side navigation bar for quick access to specific sections. This approach allows us to show additional information right in the item pane without compromising usability. Plugins are also able to easily create dedicated sections with custom information or actions.

At the top of the item pane, a new customizable header lets you choose what info to show: title, title/author/date, or even a bibliography entry in your chosen citation style. The header remains visible when the Info section is collapsed, so you can choose to keep the Info section closed when you’re not editing metadata and still see the title and other important info.

Dark Mode

We heard the calls: Zotero 7’s new design includes a gorgeous dark mode. We know dark mode is important to many people, so we wanted to do it right: every part of the new design was created with dark mode in mind.

We’ve also implemented basic dark-mode support for PDF and EPUB content, with more advanced rendering options coming soon. If you need to view a document in its original state, you can disable dark mode for content from the reader’s View menu.

Compact vs. Comfortable

We now offer two density options for Zotero’s user interface, Compact and Comfortable. Compact resembles the previous density, while Comfortable, the new default, provides a more approachable experience for new users with smaller libraries or people who just prefer a bit more breathing room.

New App Icon

Finally, to complete the look, we’ve created a delightful new app icon.

Improved Performance

Zotero 7 is dramatically faster across the board, and it brings native support for Apple Silicon Macs, 64-bit Windows, and Windows on ARM, ensuring smooth operation on the latest hardware.

Improved Reader with EPUB and Snapshot Support

Zotero 7 includes the next major version of the built-in PDF reader — which, in fact, is no longer just a PDF reader!

EPUB

EPUB is the most popular ebook file format, and many people prefer EPUBs to PDFs for the improved reading experience they provide. Unlike PDFs, which have fixed layouts, most EPUBs allow text to reflow to the size of your window or device, and you can adjust the font and text size to your liking.

EPUBs now open in Zotero’s built-in reader in the same way as PDFs, and you can annotate them and add those annotations to notes just as you’ve been able to for PDFs.

Zotero can also automatically retrieve metadata for most EPUBs and create a parent item.

While Zotero won’t yet download EPUBs automatically from websites, we’ll soon make it possible to specify whether to save PDFs or EPUBs when both are available, and then we’ll begin the process of updating site translators to support EPUBs. If there’s a site that provides EPUBs that you’d like us to support, please let us know in the Zotero Forums.

Webpage Snapshots

Zotero already saves webpage snapshots on news articles and other pages, and those now open automatically in the new reader as well, enabling you to annotate webpages as easily as PDFs.

New Annotation Types

We’ve also added support for creating ink, underline, and text annotations. Ink annotations were already supported on iOS, and it’s now possible to create them in the desktop app as well. (This works best if you have a touchscreen PC or stylus.)

Underline annotations work just like highlights, while text annotations allow you to add text directly to the page.

Underline annotations are available for PDFs, EPUBs, and snapshots, while ink and text annotations are available for PDFs only.

Smart Reference Popup

Hovering over a citation or internal link now opens a popup showing the associated reference or figure. No need to jump back and forth just to check a reference.

Smarter Citing

Citing your sources is now faster and more intuitive. The citation dialog automatically suggests items you have selected in the items list or have open in the reader. Citing something you’re viewing is now as simple as clicking Add/Edit Citation and pressing Enter/Return.

Collection Search

Quickly find the collection you’re looking for in any of your libraries and jump to it without your fingers leaving the keyboard.

Press Enter/Return after typing to move to the collections list, up/down-arrow to move between results, and Esc to clear the search.

Tabs Menu

See a vertical list of all your tabs, type to filter the list, and quickly jump to a given tab. You can also quickly close or reorder tabs right from the menu.

Attachment Previews

See a preview of PDFs, EPUBs, snapshots, and images right in the item pane without opening the reader.

Collections and Searches in the Trash

Deleted collections and searches are now moved to the trash, just like items. If you delete a collection by accident, you can easily restore it from the trash with all the same items and subcollections.

“Libraries and Collections” List

A new section in the item pane shows all the collections and libraries the current item is in. (You can still hold down a modifier key to highlight the collections an item is in.)

Customizable File Renaming

Zotero has always automatically renamed files, but you can now rename files according to a much wider array of options. Write complex rules to make sure filenames always contain all the information you need.

Improved Accessibility

We’ve put in a huge amount of work to make Zotero more accessible to users of screen readers, and we’ve improved keyboard navigation throughout the app. We’re still working to make additional accessibility improvements and will be rolling out more changes in upcoming updates.

Improved Plugin Architecture

Zotero’s own functionality is supplemented by a vast ecosystem of plugins that can transform the Zotero experience: advanced BibTeX support, knowledge management, language translation, custom scripts, AI integration, and much more.

Zotero 7 introduces a new plugin architecture with restartless loading/unloading and built-in support for common integration points (items-list columns, item-pane sections, settings panes, etc.), which helps make plugins easier to write and more stable across Zotero updates. We’re working with plugin developers to add additional integration points.

All plugins need to be updated for Zotero 7. If there’s a plugin you depend on, check with the plugin developer to see if a version is available for Zotero 7.

And Much More

The Zotero 7 update includes much more than we can list here. See the changelog for additional details.

Get Zotero 7

If you’re already running Zotero, you can upgrade from within Zotero by going to Help → “Check for Updates…”.

Existing Windows users should install 64-bit Zotero for the best performance. You can reinstall over your existing version without affecting your data.

If you’re using an Apple Silicon Mac and do an in-app upgrade from Zotero 6, Zotero 7 will continue to run under Rosetta immediately after updating, so restart it for native performance.

Don’t yet have Zotero? Download Zotero 7 now.

Friday, December 9, 2022
10:00 AM US Eastern Time

Thursday, December 15, 2022
3:00 PM US Eastern Time

What are the research and citation management needs of undergraduate students, and how does Zotero fit in? In this 60-minute interactive session, we’ll share tips and strategies for teaching Zotero to novice researchers, based on the instructor’s experience teaching Zotero library instruction sessions at a small liberal arts college and a research university.

About the instructor

Brendan O’Connell is an Outreach Coordinator with Zotero. He is an academic librarian by training, with many years of experience in higher education and technology, most recently at Smith College and North Carolina State University in the United States. His work as a librarian has included teaching Zotero to hundreds of students, faculty, and fellow librarians in many different formats and settings.

Brendan’s work with Zotero will focus on a variety of outreach and engagement efforts, including teaching webinars that will train librarians to better teach Zotero to students and faculty at their home institutions, as well as creating tutorial materials for a general academic audience. He is passionate about open-source software and protecting user privacy, values long held in common between libraries and Zotero.

PDF Reader and New Note Editor

With Zotero 6, you can now:

• Open PDFs in a new built-in reader within the main Zotero window, in a new tabbed interface
• Clean up metadata for items while viewing your PDFs
• Mark up PDFs with highlights, notes, and image annotations
• Add annotations to Zotero notes with automatic citations, in a powerful new note editor
• Cite other items directly in notes using Zotero’s familiar citation dialog
• Insert notes into your Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs documents with active Zotero citations for automatically generating bibliographies
• Export notes to external Markdown editors with links back to Zotero items and PDFs

Together with Zotero’s powerful saving abilities and word processor plugins, Zotero can now help you with the entire path from an interesting item online to a cited quote in your final document.

Seamless Annotation Syncing

Like all Zotero library data, the annotations you create will automatically sync across all your Zotero devices. There’s no need to close a PDF on one computer or worry about losing annotations due to sync conflicts.

In addition to annotating your own files, you can also create PDF annotations in group libraries, allowing you to collaboratively mark up PDFs with other group members and immediately see each other’s changes.

Zotero’s PDF reader syncs with our new Zotero iOS app, allowing you to highlight and take notes on your iPad or iPhone and then quickly pull those annotations into a note or word processor document when you’re back at your computer. You can even view ink annotations made with an Apple Pencil.

PDFs will open automatically to your current page, no matter what device you last used.

Annotations in Notes

After you’ve marked up a PDF, you can quickly add some or all annotations to a Zotero note.

Annotations added to notes aren’t just plain text: they include information about the source PDF that lets you quickly jump back to the original page to see context, generate bibliography entries using Zotero’s word processor plugins, toggle annotation colors on and off, include links back to Zotero when exporting to Markdown, and even restore accidentally deleted citations to make sure you’ve properly attributed a quote.

With note templates, you can customize the format of the annotations you add.

If you previously used the ZotFile extension to extract PDF annotations to Zotero notes, you can now use Zotero directly and benefit from these new features.

Adding Notes to Word Processors

When using one of the Zotero word processor plugins, a new “Add Note” button lets you insert any Zotero note directly into the document. Citations in the note, including those generated from PDF annotations, will remain active, so they’ll automatically be added to your bibliography.

Markdown Export

Notes now have their own Quick Copy setting, with a choice between Markdown + Rich Text or raw HTML. You can copy or drag notes from the items list, or even individual annotations from the PDF reader, directly to an external editor, with Markdown links back to the item and PDF page associated with annotations.

Embedded Images in Notes

Zotero notes now support embedded images. You can drag in images from your computer or the web, and they’ll sync to your other devices. You can even create an image annotation in the PDF reader and drag it straight into a note to create a cited image in your document.

Additional Zotero 6 Features

Zotero 6 also continues to refine Zotero’s existing functionality and addresses some popular feature requests.

Non-English Spellchecking

If you write in a language other than English, you can now add over 40 dictionaries for spellchecking in Zotero notes. No more red squiggly lines!

Improved Mendeley and Citavi Import

If you’re currently a Mendeley user (or know one), Zotero’s built-in Mendeley importer will now import Mendeley annotations for use in the new PDF reader. And a new import process allows you to import your Mendeley data directly from the online library (despite the database encryption added by Elsevier that made it impossible to import from a local copy of your own Mendeley library).

Importing from Citavi will now bring in Citavi PDF annotations.

Bundled Safari Extension

For Mac users running Big Sur or later, the Zotero Connector for Safari is now bundled with Zotero and can be enabled from the Extensions pane of the Safari preferences.

Other Changes

For the full list of changes in Zotero 6, see the changelog.

Get Zotero 6

If you’re already running Zotero, you can upgrade from within Zotero by going to Help → “Check for Updates…”.

Don’t yet have Zotero? Get it now from the download page.

Today we’re adding a feature that lets you move documents between Google Docs and Word or LibreOffice while preserving active Zotero citations. You can now begin writing a document collaboratively in Google Docs and move it to Word or LibreOffice for final editing, or vice versa.

When you use this feature, Zotero will convert the citations and bibliography to a temporary format that can be transferred safely between word processors.

We’ve added instructions for specific word processors, but the basic process is the same:

1. Choose “Switch to a Different Word Processor…” from the plugin’s Document Preferences window.
2. Save the converted file.
3. Open the file in the other word processor.
4. Click Refresh to continue using it.

In Google Docs, you can also choose “Switch Word Processors…” from the Zotero menu.

While the process should be entirely reversible, we recommend performing the conversion in a copy of the file.

While this conversion process is required to move active citations in and out of Google Docs, you can also use it to move documents between Word and LibreOffice without some of the problems inherent in Bookmarks mode.

You can start using this feature today in Zotero 5.0.72 and Zotero Connector 5.0.57.

How It Works

Retracted publications are flagged in the items list, and if you click on one you’ll see a warning at the top of the item pane with details on the retraction and links to additional information.

If you try to cite a retracted item using the word processor plugin, Zotero will warn you and confirm that you still want to cite it. If you’ve already added a citation to a document and it later is retracted, Zotero will warn you the next time you update the document’s citations, even if the item no longer exists in your Zotero library or was added by a co-author.

Currently, this feature is limited to items with a DOI or PMID (entered in the DOI field or in Extra as “DOI:”, “PMID:”, or “PubMed ID:”), which covers about 3/4 of Retraction Watch data, but we’re hoping to support items without identifiers as best as possible in a future update.

Designed for Privacy

The full retraction data is stored on Zotero servers, but we’ve designed this feature in a way that allows the Zotero client to check for retracted items without sharing the contents of your library. You don’t need to use Zotero syncing or upload a list of items to benefit from this feature.

For each item in your library, Zotero calculates a non-unique identifier that could map to hundreds or thousands of publications, and then compares those to a list of similar partial identifiers of retracted publications that it retrieves from Zotero servers. For each potential match, it requests the full details of all possible retractions, and then checks for local items matching any of those full identifiers and flags any that it finds. The Zotero servers have no way of knowing whether you have the retracted work in your library or one of hundreds or thousands of others. (A similar approach is used by some tools to check for compromised passwords without sharing the passwords they’re checking with the server.) And, as with our other services, we’re not logging the contents of even these anonymized lookups.

This feature is available today in Zotero 5.0.67.