Notes and reference managers

What you highlight and write in Skyreader can follow you into the tools you write with. New highlights and notes arrive on their own, each with the article’s citation details: its link, author, dates, and a DOI or arXiv id where a paper has one.

Syncing is part of the Supporter plan. Downloading everything once, as Markdown or BibTeX, is on every plan: see Exporting.

Zotero

Skyreader adds your saves to your Zotero library as references, and keeps your highlights and notes in a note on each.

1. At zotero.org/settings/keys, make a new key with Allow library access and Allow write access turned on. Copy it.
2. In Skyreader, open Settings → Notes & references, paste the key under Zotero, and choose Connect.

Skyreader syncs about every 15 minutes, or when you choose Sync now.

What to sync

• Everything. Every save, and every article you highlighted without saving.
• Chosen collections. Only the saves in the Shelf collections you pick, highlighted or not.

What arrives

Each article becomes an item in a Skyreader collection: a preprint for an arXiv paper, a journal article for anything else with a DOI, and otherwise a web page, document or book. It carries the title, authors, publication date, link, and the day you saved it as the accessed date.

Your highlights and notes go in a note on the item, titled Skyreader highlights, and that note is updated when they change. Write your own notes in a note of their own: Skyreader rewrites only its note.

If a paper is already in your library with the same DOI, the note goes on that item instead of a second copy.

An item is yours once it’s in Zotero. Edit it as you like: Skyreader doesn’t change it again. Delete it and it isn’t added back. Removing a save in Skyreader leaves its item in Zotero, and so does disconnecting. Removing a highlight takes it out of the note.