# Zotero + DevonThink - i thought i was gonna be clever but i think it's not possible

**URL:** <https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/zotero-devonthink-i-thought-i-was-gonna-be-clever-but-i-think-its-not-possible/70838>\
**Category:** DEVONthink\
**Created:** [May 2, 2022, 11:25pm UTC](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/zotero-devonthink-i-thought-i-was-gonna-be-clever-but-i-think-its-not-possible/70838 "2022-05-02T23:25:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![MichiganUser](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/e9c0ed/32.png) [@MichiganUser](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/u/MichiganUser)\
**Post date:** [May 2, 2022, 11:25pm UTC](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/zotero-devonthink-i-thought-i-was-gonna-be-clever-but-i-think-its-not-possible/70838/1 "2022-05-02T23:25:16Z")

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Zotero’s killer feature (at last competitively) is the ability to look up all manner of bibliographic information and attach it to every file in your research library. Pretty awesome stuff! In every other respect, however, DevonThink strictly dominates in every other substantively significant aspect of research workflow.

This raises a question! Can I run Zotero on my PDFs, generate the super useful bibliographical information and tagging, but still leave the tagged PDFs within the DevonThink ecosystem? So far as I can tell, the answer unfortunately is “no.”

Here’s a screenshot of the Zotero data generated by importing an academic paper into Zotero:

 ![Screen Shot 2022-05-02 at 7.17.15 PM](https://devontech-discourse.s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/original/3X/8/7/876c144bd3ffd7b49e86098239423bd91cfcb4d2.png)

Now, I take that exact, newly-tagged-by-Zotero PDF and drag it into the indexed section of my DevonThink area. So the tags will come too, right? Wrong–when I look in the tags section of the DT inspector for the newly-indexed file, the result is bupkis–either under the “generic” tag inspector or under the “custom” tag inspector:

 ![Screen Shot 2022-05-02 at 7.23.09 PM](https://devontech-discourse.s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/original/3X/a/9/a9febf9a44585377aa0d92f107a33c21f00629df.png)  
 ![Screen Shot 2022-05-02 at 7.23.13 PM](https://devontech-discourse.s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/original/3X/b/e/befd8aaf8022f37bdca479d44e9d47ab45c34a54.png)

I’m guessing this is because Zotero doesn’t really tag the actual PDF; rather perhaps it associates the PDF with a meta-file that has the bibliographic information in a format visible only to Zotero itself? (At least, that’s what the screenshot of Zotero above suggests–a parent/child relationship between a document containing the information and the PDF itself.) But there’s enough celebration of Zotero as an open-source, profit-indifferent entity that **I’m wondering if there’s some way I can capture the fruits of Zotero tagging _from within DevonThink?_**

Any and all thoughts hugely welcome…

Your pal in the morass of setting-up-a-new-research-effort push,  
MichiganUser

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