A direct link to a Zotero entry is very useful but using only the title is not sufficient.

I've changed my Zotero exporter to include some additional data such as authors, publication title, date and DOI. The created string is not compliant to any of the well-known citations styles (Chicago Manual of Style, Harvard, IEEE, etc.) but covers the necessary information to retrieve the reference in case Zotero does not work or some other "Zoterocalypse".

In addition to my previous post about connecting Zotero and Evernote I present a solution to create RTF links to Zotero elements in Evernote.

For my workflow it would be great to copy an element in Zotero and paste it as clickable link into Evernote, ideally using the title as text and the Zotero select URI as target. This could only be possible if the function of Zotero that copies text to the clipboard supports formatted (i.e. RTF) content. Usually the clipboard contains several data formats when copying something. If you e.g. copy text from a website containing a link the plain text is stored in the clipboard and additionally there is a version preserving the links, font style and color. Now when you paste the contents e.g. into Microsoft Word, all the formatting will be shown as it was on the website. In notepad only the plain text will be visible. The Zotero (export) translator will always fill the plain text area of the clipboard. Based on my experiments even RTF text with a valid RTF header written to the output won't be recognised as RTF text when pasted into Word or Evernote.

So, what can we do? The first step was to change the output of the Zotero export translator (quick copy) as you can see here. The output now contains at least the Zotero select URI and the title (e.g. <a href="zotero://select/items/0_KJ6MZWKT">CloudML</a>). Then I found the shell command textutil which is able to convert HTML to RTF. You can try the following command in the Terminal which converts an HTML link to RTF and copies the result into the clipboard. Pasting in Word or Evernote will result in a clickable link to Google.com with the text "Test".

echo "<a href=\"http://www.google.com\">Test</a>" | textutil -stdin -stdout -format html -convert rtf | pbcopy

Now that we have a way to get HTML links out of Zotero and found a tool to convert HTML to RTF it's time to put everything together. Automator is a tool in OS X that enables the creation of custom services and workflows. I use it to create a service running a shell command for which a keyboard shortcut can be assigned later on. It's straightforward: Create a service, select "Run Shell Script" and add the command.

Automator in OS X

It is very important to set the encoding of the shell environment first because it's not set to UTF-8 as it might be in your Terminal. This is the command I eventually used (Set encoding, use the contents of the clipboard as input for textutil and then save the output in the clipboard):

export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8; pbpaste | textutil -stdin -stdout -format html -convert rtf -inputencoding utf-8 | pbcopy

When you save the workflow it's available in this menu: System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts. In the services category you will find your newly created service and can assign a keyboard shortcut.

Keyboard Shortcuts in OS X

This is my upgraded workflow with the goal to create clickable links in Evernote pointing to Zotero entries:

1. Select entries in Zotero, press CMD+Shift+C to copy the HTML links
2. Press CMD+CTRL+Shift+C to convert the HTML code in the clipboard to RTF
3. Paste links in Evernote

Evernote with RTF links

For collecting and managing references and scientific publications I use Zotero because it has a nice browser integration. You can simply click on the Zotero icon and the reference will be automatically saved to Zotero including the full-text PDF (e.g. on IEEE Xplore), title, author, entry type (e.g. journal article, website, thesis, book), etc. You can arrange your findings using folders for different topics and even use an entry simultaneously in multiple folders without having duplicate files. After collecting references I export them in BibTeX format to use them in TeXlipse.

Although Zotero can store various file types such as text, audio, video, images and much more I prefer Evernote for organizing my notes, writing paper summaries and collecting ideas. Now we need a way to connect both worlds.

The Goal

Ideally, I would select a reference in Zotero, press CMD+C to copy its absolute URI, select some text in Evernote, add a hyperlink to the URI and that's it. The result would be a link in Evernote which brings up the reference in Zotero when I click on it. Well, let's see what is possible.

Some apps support a certain URI scheme to give other applications access to their content. E.g. in Evernote you can copy the link of a note and get something like evernote:///view/12345689/s123/.../ which can be used to create clickable hyperlinks between your notes. Zotero is also capable of creating and understanding links but it takes a custom translator-plugin to access it. First you have to distinguish between the Zotero item URI, which is in fact a web URL pointing to the reference in your Zotero online account (http://zotero.org/users/12345/items/XXYYZZZ), and the Zotero select link that is the desired URI in the format zotero://select/items/0_XXYYZZAA. Based on the translator-plugin by nschneid I created my own simplified version that exports only the plain URIs of the selected elements by using the shortcut CMD+Shift+C.

Now that we have the URI for accessing the reference it's time to make use of it. Evernote is a very smart program but sometimes it's too smart. When you create a link it only supports URLs that start with the common schemas such as http, https, ftp, ssh, etc. Using a zotero://... URI the "OK" button is simply deactivated and adding the link is not possible. To create clickable Zotero select links it is necessary to enable intelligent links (right click > replacements). This way pasted Zotero select links are automatically converted in clickable links when you hit enter!

(It is possible that the URI is not associated with Zotero and nothing happens when you click on it. What helped in my case is to create a .html file containing a hypertext reference such as <a href="zotero://select/items/0_XXYYZZAA">My Link</a>, open it in your browser, click on it and make sure to allow your browser to open Zotero for this specific URI schema.)

Summary / TL;DR:

1. Goal: Create clickable links in Evernote pointing to Zotero entries
2. Zotero: Install my customized translator-plugin (download on GitHub Gist)
3. Zotero: Select entries, press CMD+Shift+C to copy the item URI
4. Evernote: Right click > Enable Intelligent Links
5. Evernote: Paste item URI and press enter

Links to Zotero entries in Evernote

The connection of Evernote and Zotero is awesome for managing references, writing summaries, collecting ideas and organizing research.