Anyone who does research writing needs a pdf and citation manager. I had been a fan of Mendeley until they were bought by Elsevier who changed the code in a way that made it no longer usable for me. Those issues may be fixed now, but it’s too late. I’ve thrown my lot in with Zotero.

Every research writer needs a place to store and annotate their pdfs. Writers also need a way to quickly add properly formatted citations to a text. Zotero does both. Are you collaborating with a co-author? Zotero can handle your shared resources.

We would need a two-hour workshop to cover everything that Zotero can do. In this blog post, I won’t cover everything. If you’re a webinar kind of person, check out Zotero’s free webinars. If you’re a video tutorial kind of person, check out these community-created Zotero tutorials. For now, I want to show you how to get started with—and add references to—Zotero.

Getting started with Zotero

After installing Zotero, get the plugin for your preferred word processor: Word, LibreOffice, Google Docs. Next, add the Zotero Connector to your preferred web browser: Firefox, Chrome, Safari.

The plugin for your word processor will allow you to click a button to search and add a reference. The in-text citation will be added, and when you click the Zotero button to add the bibliography, all of the citations you’ve added to your paper will be properly formatted according to whatever citation style you select.

Adding reference items to Zotero

To add citations to a paper, you first need to get the citation information into your Zotero database. There are (at least) four ways to do it.

Zotero Connector—the add-in for your web browser—will allow you to save any webpage to your Zotero database. If you are in your library’s database viewing an article, click the Zotero button in your web browser to automatically download the pdf to your computer, store it in your Zotero database, and pull the article’s metadata into Zotero’s bibliographic fields.

In this example, I found an article in my library’s database and clicked the Zotero Connector icon in Chrome. I got a little pop-up asking me which of my Zotero folders I’d like to save the article to. I chose my Demo folder. There is no save button here; Zotero will handle the download on its own.

Over in Zotero, in my Demo folder is the article, including a full text pdf. Clicking on that pdf will open it in a new Zotero tab where I can add notes. All of the metadata from the pdf has been populated into Zotero’s bibliographic fields. Always double-check these data. The most common issue is that some journals routinely capitalize every word in the title. If that happens, click on the title and edit the capitalization. When you’re done editing, click off the field, and Zotero will save your changes.

A second way to get a pdf into Zotero is to locate the pdf on computer and then click and drag it onto a Zotero folder. Any metadata in the pdf will automatically populate Zotero’s bibliographic fields.

A third way to add bibliographic information is to use Zotero’s magic wand—the “add item(s) by identifier” icon. Try this. Navigate to whichever Zotero folder you’d like to add an item to. Click on the magic wand icon, and copy/paste this doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0280036

Zotero will automatically add the item with its bibliographic data to your folder. Zotero will also search for a pdf of the article. If it can find it, it will add the pdf to the item as it will in this case. If Zotero doesn’t bring in the pdf automatically, right click on the item, and in the pop-up menu, you can ask Zotero to search for a pdf. If Zotero can’t find a pdf, but you find one later, click and drag the pdf from your computer onto the item title in Zotero. Zotero will attach it to that entry.

A fourth way to add an item to your Zotero folder is manually. Choose the Zotero folder you’d like to add the entry to, click Zotero’s “add item” button, select the type of entry you’d like to add, and then fill in the fields.

Adding citations to your paper

With the bibliographic information in (regardless of which four techniques I used), I can now use the Zotero “Add/Edit Citation” button in my word processor (Word, LibreOffice, Google Docs) to quickly add the citation to my research paper, then click the “Add/Edit Bibliography” to get all of the full references listed. If you notice an error in your reference list, go to Zotero and fix the bibliographic information for the item(s). Come back to your paper and click the “Refresh” button. The in-text citations and the reference list will be updated to reflect your changes.

For those of you who use Zotero as your go-to pdf and reference manager, you may have encountered problems with citing advance online publications as needed in APA style. I’ve learned the secret. Here’s the citation I am aiming to create using Zotero

Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2022). A little good goes an unexpectedly long way: Underestimating the positive impact of kindness on recipients. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001271

To get that “Advance online publication” inserted before the doi, find the Extra field in your Zotero citation. In that field, copy/paste this text: {:status: Advance online publication}

Click off the field to save it. That’s it. Zotero is now ready to produce your correctly formatted reference.

Side note, I found the answer in a 2016 Zotero forum. And that, my friends, is how far behind the times I am. In 2020, someone asked in the forum if there is now an easier way to do this. Nope, still isn’t.

As I get ready for next term, I’ve copied my fall Canvas course into next term’s course. My Trello “course reset” checklist tells me that I need to delete all of my course announcements. As of this writing, the only option Canvas gives me to do that is to manually click each box and then click the trashcan icon at the top of the page.

This seems unnecessarily cumbersome, but we have a couple workarounds.

Tampermonkey

If you have installed Tampermonkey, I recommend this userscript available via the Greasy Fork.

IMPORTANT: If you use this script, edit line 7 to read:

// @match https://*/courses/*/announcements

That will ensure that this script only runs on the announcements page and no other pages.

To check all of the checkboxes on your Announcements page, click on the Tampermonkey icon and select “Check all checkboxes.” If you change your mind, click on the Tampermonkey icon and select “Uncheck all checkboxes.” To delete your checked announcements, click the trashcan icon at the top of the Announcements page.

Browser’s developer console

If you don’t have Tampermonkey, consider exploring it on this blog’s Canvas Enhancements page. But if you’re not quite ready to go that route, here’s your workaround courtesy of Nico Durand via the Canvas Community.

In your browser (Firefox or Chrome), press CTRL + SHIFT + I to open your browser’s developer’s tools. You will see a scary box across the bottom of your browser. Click the Console tab. At the very bottom, next to the >>, paste in this code: document.querySelectorAll(“input”).forEach(e => e.click())

In Firefox, you may get a warning about allowing the pasting of text. Just type in the >> box whatever the screen tells you to enter. I think it’s just “Allow pasting.” And now you’ll be able to paste in the code.

Press Enter. All of your checkboxes will be selected. At the top of the Announcements page, click the trashcan icon to delete them all.

If you have updated Windows 11 recently, you have a new feature that will make your life a little easier. It comes without fanfare and therefore is easy to miss.

File explorer tabs

Open file explorer—that’s what you use to see your files and folders. At the very top of your file explorer window, you now have tabs. In this screenshot, you can see that I have one tab open: Dropbox. Clicking the plus sign to the right of that tab will open a new tab.

When I clicked the plus sign to open a new tab, I navigated to my Downloads folder. Dropbox is open in one tab, and Downloads in the other.

While it’s nice to be able to navigate between folders without having to have multiple file explorer windows open, here comes the magic. I can click and drag a file from one tab to another tab. Once I’m over that other tab, I can choose where in that folder I want to move the file.

Some of the nicest things in life are the simplest.

Office Tab

If you’re a fan of tabs, you might also enjoy having your Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files open as tabs instead of as separate windows.

While this feature is not built into Microsoft Office, there is a third party product for Windows that will do this called Office Tab. Download and try it for free for 30 days. After that, it is yours with a one-time purchase price of $39. That comes with two years’ worth of updates and tech support. I first wrote about Office Tab in 2011. Have you noticed how technology changes? Office Tab has a bunch of features now—including choosing a color for each tab and creating groups of files that can all be opened with one click. It’s probably time for a new blog post dedicated just to Office Tab.

For all of you Canvas learning management system users, I have compiled all of my favorite Canvas enhancements onto one page. The page is listed as a link in the top horizontal menu for easy access. If there is anything on the Canvas enhancements page that could be clearer, please let me know via sue@suefrantz.com.

There is no shortage of screen/webcam recording tools. It occurred to someone at Dropbox that if so many people are uploading their recordings to Dropbox and sharing links to those recordings, wouldn’t it be easier if recordings were automatically saved to Dropbox? Enter the newest recording tool: Dropbox Capture.

Those of us on Dropbox Basic, Plus, and Family plans get 120 minutes of total recording time. Once you record something using Dropbox Capture, a folder called “Capture” will be added to your Dropbox folder. Once I’ve recorded 120 minutes, I’ll need to delete or move recordings to be able to record more. It’s better thought of as stored recording time, not actual recording time. When I near my limit, I can navigate to my Dropbox folder, click on the Capture folder, then click and drag my recordings (mp4 files) into a different folder. Easy peasy.

Do you remember when Dropbox first launched? We had a small amount of storage space, but if people joined using a link we gave them, Dropbox would add space to our account (see this 2011 blog post, for example). They are taking the same approach with Dropbox Capture. If you use this link to download Dropbox Capture, Dropbox will give both of us an additional 20 minutes of recording time.

Installing Dropbox Capture

Visit this Dropbox Capture page, and click the “Accept Invite” button. Sign in to your Dropbox account. If you don’t have an account, click the “Create an account” link. After logging in, you’ll be asked to allow Dropbox Capture to connect to your Dropbox account. Next, click the big blue Download for Windows (or Download for Mac, I’m guessing it says) button. Lastly, run the installer from wherever it downloaded to—probably your Download folder.

How Dropbox Capture works

Launch Dropbox Capture. (Tangent: we used to run programs. Now we launch apps. It’s the same thing. We’ve just become more dramatic.)

Dropbox Capture is pretty intuitive to use. In the Capture window (screenshot below), I can see how many recording minutes I have (120) and how many I’ve used so far (1). I’ve recorded more minutes than that, but I’ve deleted the recordings I don’t need. Clicking on the folder icon will open my Dropbox Capture folder. Clicking on the globe icon takes me to capture.dropbox.com where I can see all of my recordings.

That recording I just did? You can watch it here. Note that in the top right corner of that video page, there is a transcript button. Dropbox Capture created that transcript all on its own. It did a pretty good job, but it’s not perfect. I wish it were, because as of this writing, there does not appear to be a way to edit the transcript.

With Dropbox Capture we can do a screen recording with our camera showing us in a corner of the screen. If you don’t like the placement of the webcam video, just click and drag it somewhere else on the screen. If you don’t want the webcam at all, choose “screen recording.” Your microphone will be on by default, but you can mute it by clicking the mic icon.

Or maybe you just want a static screenshot? Select “Screenshot” and draw a box around what you want. In the bottom right corner of your screen, you’ll see the screenshot. Click the pencil icon to edit your screenshot. The tool bar includes the ability add text, free draw, add a line/arrow/circle/square, blur a part of the image, crop the image, change the color and the weight of the text/line/etc.

When your image looks as you’d like, click the “Save and copy” button. The image will automatically be saved to your Dropbox Capture folder. Take a look at my edited image.

And, of course, you can also just do an audio recording or just a webcam (plus audio) recording (again, click the mic icon to mute if you just want the video with no audio).

capture.dropbox.com

Visit the https://capture.dropbox.com/ webpage to see everything you’ve created with Capture.

Click “Create collection” to create, well, collections. You can create multiple collections, and you can add the same recording to multiple collections. If you’re familiar with the concept of tagging content, this is really what this is. Click on a collection (here I have a collection called New Mexico Recordings) to get a link to the collection.

Under each item, there is a plus sign icon. Click on it to add it to a collection. Click the link icon to get a link to the video. The default security setting is “Anyone with a link” can access it. Click the trash can icon to delete.

By clicking on my recording (but not the screen capture), I have a rudimentary editing tool. I can click and drag from the left or right to delete content at the beginning or end of the recording. How do we remove something from the middle of the recording? I have no idea. It’s possible to click in the middle. It adds a blue line, but I can’t actually select anything. Click and drag? Doesn’t work. Click, press shift or ctrl, click something else? No luck. It doesn’t look like Dropbox Capture’s technical writers know how to do it either. They write on the “how to edit videos” page, “Use the controls at the bottom of the window to select a portion of your video.” I’m going to guess that this feature was not ready for primetime, but Dropbox didn’t want to delay the release of Dropbox Capture. A

Conclusion

Dropbox Capture makes solid use of the Dropbox ecosystem. This is a good tool for quick one-off recordings. If you need more robust video editing tools (something more than deleting the start and end of the recording, ability to edit the transcript), Dropbox Capture is not the tool for you (yet?).

In spring of 2022, I wrote about some of the very cool features in MS PowerToys for Windows 10 and 11, such as highlighting the mouse pointer (very handy with three screens) and creating fixed zones on the desktop to drop windows into (also very handy with three screens). The good folks at Microsoft have just released a PowerToys update with three new features: text extractor, quick accent, and screen ruler. I’m particularly excited about the first two.

Get PowerToys here. It’s free. No ads. No annual fees. It really is free.

If you already have PowerToys, to get the update, launch PowerToys from your Windows start menu, and on the PowerToys general tab click the “Check for updates” button.

Text extractor

This tool allows you to grab the text from anywhere on your screen. Yes, that also includes images. Use the keyboard shortcut to run the text extractor: Windows key + Shift + t (for text). Your screen will go gray. Click and drag your mouse to draw a rectangle around the text you want to capture. Unclick your mouse. Windows has captured the text from the image, and that text is now on clipboard ready for pasting.

For an example, let’s take this CDC infographic.

I’m going to run the text extractor on the infographic title and subtitle. I press windows key + shift + t. My screen turns gray, and I click and drag from the top left corner of the title to the bottom right corner of the subtitle. The content is quietly sent to my clipboard. When I paste it, I get this text:

ADDRESS IT TODAY. PREVENT IT TOMORROW.

We can reduce the generational impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), overdose, and suicide.

Pretty slick, eh?

Quick accent

I have a need to type accented letters often enough that I need a quick way to do it, but not often enough that I can remember how to do it. I confident this is going to solve it for me, because there is only keyboard combination I need to remember.

Quick accent is disabled by default. To enable it, launch PowerToys from your Windows start menu. Select “Quick Accent.” Next to “Enable Quick Accent,” flip the switch to the on position.

On your keyboard, press and hold the letter you want accented, then press and release the spacebar or left or right arrow keys. This will give you a toolbar of accents to choose from. Here, I pressed and held a, and then pressed and released the spacebar. I can then use my keyboard arrow keys to select the accent I want.

When you’ve selected the accent you want, release the letter key.

á

That’s worth going through one more time.

1. Press and hold letter key
2. Press and release spacebar, left arrow key, or right arrow key
3. Use arrow keys to select the accent
4. Release letter key

If you’re like me, you will discover that it’s not unusual to press a letter key at the end of a word while simultaneously pressing the spacebar to move onto the next word. For example, when typing “the,” if I press the e and press the spacebar at the same time, and then I release the e as I prepare to move on to the next word, I end up selecting the very first option in the toolbar, so what I actually type is “thé.” That’s great if I’m writing about French tea; it’s less great if I just want the mundane article “the.” Soon after I had quick accents up and running, I found myself making this error quite a bit. Hours later, the feedback has helped my brain adjust my typing to be more precise. I still make the error, but they are getting less frequent.

By default, the accent options toolbar appears in the top center of the screen. For some reason, I have a hard time finding it up there. In the quick accent section of PowerToys, I changed the location of the toolbar to bottom center. This seems to be a better spot for me. You do you.

Screen ruler

The last PowerToys tool in this update measures the number of pixels for objects on your screen. Windows key + Shift + M (for measuring) will cause the pixel measuring toolbar to appear in the top center of your screen.

Click the first icon—dashed square. Click and drag around an area you want to measure. Here you can see the red line that marks the area I’ve measured. The measurement of 333 pixels by 462 pixels appears in the bottom right corner. When you are done measuring, click the dashed square icon again.

For my purposes, that’s the only icon in the toolbar that I’m interested in. Try out the plus, the horizontal, and the vertical icons. Choose one, move your cursor around whatever is on your screen that you’d like to measure. The screen ruler will try its best to guess what you want measured.

When you’re done with the screen ruler, click the x at the end of the toolbar to close it.

Conclusion

That’s it for this round of PowerToys updates. Enjoy!

A colleague recently received a question bank from a publisher as a CSV (spreadsheet) file. He wondered how to get those questions into Canvas. It takes a few steps, but there is a way. For those of you hate all the clicking Canvas requires for you to create quiz questions, you will love this.

This blog post from Kristina Wilson at the Northwestern University School of Professional Studies Distance Learning office will give you all of the instructions you need on how to use the Kansas State University’s CSV to QTI converter. Here is the short version.

First, download the Kansas State template. Here are their descriptions for each of the columns (see this page).

1. Column A is the type of question: MC (multiple choice) and MR (multiple response) are used in this example. [See template.]
   
2. Column B is not used but must be there.
   
3. Column C is the point value of the question. It can be between 0-100 and up to two decimal places (3.33)
   
4. Column D is question body. Q1 or similar if you don’t want to include the real question and have students see the questions online.
   
5. Column E is the correct answer. The number 1-5 each correspond to the one of the possible answers listed in column F-J. In the example file, we use 1 to indicate a, 2 to indicate b, 3 to indicate c, 4 to indicate d, and 5 to indicate. For True/False questions, use 1 for True and 0 for False.
   
6. Columns F-J are the possible answer choices. You can have 2 or more. [Add more if you need them. It should work.]
   

As far as I’ve been able to determine, the only question types available are multiple choice (MC) and multiple response (MR). If you’re able to determine that there are other question types that can be designated in column A, please let me know (sue@suefrantz.com). Thanks!

After you’ve entered your questions, save the file. This is what mine looks like.

Next, you’ll visit the Kansas State converter page. Click Browse to find the file you just saved with all of your questions in it, then click the Perform Conversion button. In your downloads folder, you’ll now have a zip file. Do not unzip it.

Last, go to your Canvas course. In course settings, click Import Course Content. From the Content Type menu, select the last option: QTI .zip file. The quiz questions will be available as a Classic Quiz, not New Quiz.

Happy quizzing!

Zoom has released a new manual update. You can get it from their download center.

There’s not much here that is especially exciting for instructors. Here are a few highlights. If you’d like the full list, visit Zoom’s release notes page.

Hand gestures

We can now quickly turn on/turn off gesture recognition. Click the new up arrow next to Reactions to toggle “Recognize hand gestures.” This is a welcome addition for those of you who have discovered that you wave your arms a lot when speaking.

Apply video filters to future meetings

Want to be a pirate by default when joining all future meetings? Apply the video filter, and check the box next to “Apply to all future meetings.”

I can’t imagine this is a good idea, but you do you.

Breakout rooms

The release notes dated June 20, 2022 say that breakout rooms should now be searchable by participant name or by name of room. This change did not seem to make it into version 5.11.0. Or if it’s there, I don’t know how to use it.

In the years before the Internet, at the first college I worked at as faculty, the library had a table of contents service. You could tell them what journals you were interested in, and when a new print copy of the journal arrived, they would photocopy the table of contents and drop it into intracampus mail to you. If there were articles you wanted, you could highlight them on the table of contents copy and send it back to the library. The awesome library staff would photocopy the articles and send them to you, again, through intracampus mail. It was a fantastic service. And it all seems so quaint now.

Library databases now come with an automated service that does the same thing. You can get an alert when new content in your favorite journals is published or you can get an alert based on a search term where the results can come from multiple sources. The alert can come to you through email or by RSS feed, whichever you prefer. (Read more about my favorite feed reader, Inoreader, in this 2018 blog post.) If you’d like to set up alerts through your library’s database, talk with your friendly neighborhood librarian. They’ll have you up and running in no time.

If you would like to cast a wider net than the journals listed in your library’s database, consider using the free service offered by JournalTOCs. “JournalTOCs is the biggest searchable collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs). It contains articles’ metadata of TOCs for over 32,418 journals directly collected from over 3333 publishers.” The metadata is information about an article that the publisher attaches to it. Most commonly they attach bibliographic information, but many publishers also include abstracts.

Just like your library’s databases, you can create an alert for table of contents when new issues of your favorite journals are published, or you can create an alert based on a search term. Again, also like your library’s databases, you can get your alerts via email or via RSS feed.

Using JournalTOCs

Start by creating a JournalTOCs account.

Next, enter your search term. If you want to be alerted when a new table of contents is available for particular journals, search for journal titles under the Journals tab. If you want to be alerted every time an article about, say, the HEXACO model of personality is published, search for that term under the Articles tab.

Under journals I searched for Social Psychology. I’ve ticked the boxes for the journals whose table of contents I want to see when a new issue is published.

Now let’s set up the alerts. In the top right corner, mouse over your username, and select Followed Journals. At the bottom of your list of followed journals, tick the box for email alerts. Or if you’d rather get the RSS feed, click the Save & Export link to download the opml file. If you’re not sure what to do with the file, click the question mark next to Save & Export for some guidance.

Saving an article search is a little less intuitive. From the Articles tab on the home page, search for whatever you’d like. For each search you do, JournalTOCs is holding onto it.

When you’re ready to set up article alerts, mouse over your username in the top right corner, and select Saved Searches. Here you will see your searches for journals and articles. I want article alerts for HEXACO, so I’m going to click Save next to it.

Now that it’s saved, I click on Alert-me, and JournalTOCs will send me an email whenever HEXACO appears in a newly published article in one of the nearly 33,000 journals they are tracking. If I want to get this information in my feed reader, I’d click on the little orange icon next to Alert-me.

What an alert looks like in a feed reader

Two days ago, the European Journal of Social Psychology published a new issue. JournalTOCs dropped the table of contents into my feed reader. The first item is Issue Information. Clicking on it takes me to the publisher’s page for the issue. The next item is an article listed in this issue’s table of contents. JournalTOCs gave me the article title, the journal name, the authors, and the abstract. Scrolling down on this page will show me the rest of the articles in this issue.

That’s it!

Choose whatever journals you’d like. Choose whatever search terms you’d like. If you change your mind, come back to JournalTOCs, mouse over your name, click on your saved searches and edit away.