Is there a way to link citations or references to Zotero PDF at the exact page?

Hi, I’m pretty new to Obsidian/Zotero workflow, so please be gentle (I barely understand how markdown works).

What I’m trying to do:

As the title says, I would like for my citations to be clickable and open the PDF in Zotero at the exact page.
For example, if my sentence is something like:

“According to some (Zahavi 1990), consciousness is…”

I would like to be able to click on “(Zahavi 1990)” and open that PDF in Zotero. Or, if it is “(Zahavi 1990: 86)” I would like it to open the PDF on page no. 86.

What I have tried:

  1. I am using a plugin Zotero Integration, which can format citations just as I want them (Chicago Manual 17th, author-date). But the problem is that it does it as a simple (unclickable) text.

  2. Citations plugin is able to do more. If I put {{citekey}}({{zoteroSelectURI}}) (in square brackets) as markdown format, it does take me to the item in Zotero but it does not open the PDF or take me to the exact page.

  3. If I use MD notes plugin, it actually does this almost perfectly functionality-wise. For example, it has imported extracted annotation as this:

“The self that appears to the subject seems to disappear under external analysis.” (Nagel 2012:217)

How this looks like in edit mode: ([Nagel 2012:217] (zotero://open-pdf/library/items/2C3RCPK8?page=217))

And it actually opens the PDF on page 217. The problem with MD notes is that it is cumbersome to extract every annotation individually when I come across it, especially if I am just referencing without quoting (like in my first example with Zahavi).

In conclusion:

Ideally, I would like to connect Zotero Integration with MD note’s functionality, to simply press my hotkey, type in the search bar the bibliography item I want, page, and press Enter to get Chicago style as a clickable link to the exact page.

If you are using Zotero 6, you can just drag & drop annotations into Obsidian with link to the exact annotation and citation included. See this post Zotero best practices - #184 by warguelles

3 Likes

This… is exactly what I wanted. I can’t believe the solution was so simple. And here I was overthinking it with 3 different plugins! You’ve just put a stop to a week of on and off searching for a solution, I can’t thank you enough <3

This means I will switch to using Zotero’s PDF reader (I have been using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC).

P.S. Is there a way to modify the citation format of drag-and-drop? This one is perfect actually, I was just thinking do we have that option?

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