This is a form of the popular [Notero]() plugin for Zotero. The difference is that this fork allows us to support Notes directly in the Notion database with the field ZoteroNotes
(see picture below).
You can create a database in Notion using this template which includes the ZoteroNotes
field. Everything else in this plugin is the same as in the original one. Read the documentation below for help.
For a video tutorial please refer to this YouTube video:
Notero is a Zotero plugin for syncing items and notes into Notion. To use it:
Concept by @arhoff π©π»βπ¬ | Built with β€οΈ by @dvanoni
The Notero plugin watches for Zotero items being added to or modified within any collections that you specify in the Notero preferences. Whenever an item is added or modified, Notero does a few things:
notion
tag to the Zotero item.In addition to providing a convenient way to open a Notion page from Zotero, the link attachment also serves as a reference for Notero so that it can update the corresponding Notion page for a given Zotero item.
By default, Notero will sync items in your monitored collections whenever they are modified. You can disable this functionality by unchecking the Sync when items are modified option in the Notero preferences.
You can also sync items from the collection or item context menus (right-click):
[!NOTE] To prevent the "sync on modify" functionality from saving to Notion multiple times, Notero does not notify Zotero when the tag and link attachment are added to an item. This means they may not appear in Zotero immediately, and you may need to navigate to a different item and back to make them appear.
Zotero notes associated with an item can be synced into Notion as content of the corresponding page for that item. As with regular items, you can manually sync notes using the Sync to Notion option in the context menu.
Automatic syncing of notes can be enabled via the Sync notes option in the Notero preferences. When enabled, notes will automatically sync whenever they are modified. Additionally, when a regular item is synced, all of its notes will also sync if they have not already.
To sync annotations (notes and highlights) from a PDF, you'll first need to extract them into a Zotero note:
The latest release of the plugin is available on GitHub. See the changelog for release notes.
Detailed setup instructions are below.
Create the Notion database that you would like to sync Zotero items into.
See examples below that you can duplicate into your Notion workspace.
Create a Notion internal integration at https://www.notion.com/my-integrations and enable all of the "content capabilities."
Take note of the "internal integration secret" from the previous step.
Give your integration access to your database.
From the Notion developer docs:
- Go to the database page in your workspace.
- Click on the β’β’β’ More menu in the top-right corner of the page.
- Scroll down to and click + Add Connections.
- Search for and select your integration in the Search for connections... menu.
Configure the database properties as desired. See the database properties section below for more details.
Notero can sync data for the properties listed below. The only property required by Notero is one with the Title property type. The other properties are optional, so you can use only the ones that suit your needs.
The Title property can be named something other than Name
as long as it
does not conflict with any of the other property names. The name and type of
the other properties must be configured exactly as specified here. Note that
property names are case-sensitive, so the capitalization must match exactly.
Support for customizing properties is planned for the future; see issue #355.
Property Name | Property Type | Notes |
---|---|---|
Name |
Title | Format configurable via the Notion Page Title option in Notero preferences |
Abstract |
Text | |
Authors |
Text | |
Citation Key |
Text | Requires Better BibTeX |
Collections |
Multi-select | |
Date |
Text | |
Date Added |
Date | |
Date Modified |
Date | |
DOI |
URL | |
Editors |
Text | |
Extra |
Text | |
File Path |
Text | |
Full Citation |
Text | Format based on the Zotero setting for Export β Quick Copy β Item Format |
In-Text Citation |
Text | Format based on the Zotero setting for Export β Quick Copy β Item Format |
Item Type |
Select | |
Place |
Text | |
Proceedings Title |
Text | |
Publication |
Text | |
Series Title |
Text | |
Short Title |
Text | |
Tags |
Multi-select | |
Title |
Text | |
URL |
URL | |
Year |
Number | |
Zotero URI |
URL | Opens items in web library if signed in to Zotero |
ZoteroNotes |
Text | The text of the notes |
[!IMPORTANT] Notero requires Zotero version 6.0.27 or above and is also compatible with Zotero 7.
.xpi
file.
.xpi
file link and
choose Save Link As... in order to properly download the file..xpi
file by either:
For more visual guides of setting up and using Notero, see the following resources made by wonderful members of the community:
If you'd like to share how you use Notero and want to be listed here, please feel free to submit a PR or contact me!
While this would be nice, it's unfortunately beyond the scope of this plugin. Getting updates from Notion into Zotero would require setting up a hosted service that subscribes to webhooks from Notion and then uses the Zotero API to update items in Zotero. Notion has yet to release official webhook support, but there are some third-party tools that can be used for this. In theory, this is technically possible, but it would be a separate project.
There currently isn't a good way to sync files or link to local files due to the following limitations with Notion:
http:
and https:
URLs, so it's not possible to link
directly to the file using a file:
URL.For now, the best workarounds are:
File Path
property to point you to the location of the local file.Zotero URI
property and then open the file from there.To sync multiple items that are already in a monitored collection, you can do so from the collection or item context menus. See the Syncing Items section above.
If you receive the following error:
APIResponseError: Could not find database with ID: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
This most likely means you have not given Notero access to your Notion database. Ensure you follow all the steps from the Configure Notion section. Clicking the β’β’β’ button in the top-right corner of your database should show a connection for the integration you've created for Notero.
If you receive the following error:
APIResponseError: Can't update a page that is archived. You must unarchive the page before updating.
This can happen when Notero tries to sync an item that already had a Notion page created for it from a previous sync, but that page has since been deleted. (Note that deleting a Notion page moves it into the trash, and the Notion API refers to this as "archived.")
As described in the How Notero Works section, Notero
associates Zotero items with Notion pages through a link named Notion
attached
to the item. To resolve the issue, delete this link attachment on the offending
item(s) and then perform the sync again.
If you receive the following error:
APIResponseError: property is not a property that exists
This can happen if you previously synced items into one Notion database and then change your Notero preferences to specify a different database. Notero may be trying to update pages in the old database instead of creating pages in the new database, and this error can occur if different properties were configured in the different databases.
To solve this, you should delete the old database in Notion and then permanently delete it from the Trash in Notion.
We provide some example Notion databases that have been configured with all the properties synced by Notero.
Once you've opened one of the examples, click the Duplicate button in the top-right corner of the page to duplicate it into your Notion workspace.
An empty database that contains only the properties synced by Notero. Useful if you want to start from scratch and customize it yourself.
A database with multiple views and some sample entries. See below for descriptions of how you can use the different views.
DOI
or URL
property.
Extra
field in Zotero.Zotero URI
property to view/edit the entry in Zotero or to
export the bibliography entry in a different citation style.Related References
property
(e.g., articles in the same special issue, book chapters in the same edited
book, studies and commentary that respond to or extend other works).Notero was scaffolded with generator-zotero-plugin and uses build scripts heavily inspired by zotero-plugin. Many thanks to @retorquere for creating these.
The steps below are based on the Zotero Plugin Development documentation and should allow you to build and run Notero yourself.
To avoid any potential damage to your default Zotero profile, you can create a new profile for development purposes.
Create a file named zotero.config.json
that will contain the config
options used to start Zotero.
See zotero.config.example.json
for an
example file that has descriptions of all available config options.
Install dependencies:
npm ci
Build Notero and start Zotero with the plugin installed:
npm start
Alternatively, you can start your desired beta version of Zotero:
npm run start-beta
The start
script performs a number of steps:
Execute npm run build
to build the plugin into the build
directory.
If defined, run the scripts.prestart
command specified in
zotero.config.json
.
Write a file containing the absolute path to the build
directory into
the extensions
directory in the Zotero profile directory.
Remove the extensions.lastAppBuildId
and extensions.lastAppVersion
lines from prefs.js
in the Zotero profile directory.
Start Zotero with the profile specified in zotero.config.json
and the
following command line arguments:
-purgecaches -ZoteroDebugText -jsconsole -debugger -datadir profile
If defined, run the scripts.poststart
command specified in
zotero.config.json
.
Releases are performed via GitHub Actions. The
release
workflow defines the following jobs:
release-please
This job uses the release-please action to create release PRs
when new user-facing commits are pushed to the main
branch. A release PR will
bump the package version and update the changelog. When the PR is merged, this
job then creates a new version tag and GitHub release.
publish-artifacts
This job runs when a new release is created by the release-please
job. It
builds the .xpi
file and publishes it to the release. It also generates an
updated manifest file and publishes it to the release
release.