Find My Cite Beta
Are you a Zotero user? Do you ever wish you could search your libraries by ideas—not keywords? Then this page is for you. Follow the steps below to download information from one of your group libraries and search it using an "idea" search. That is, it will match your search with the semantic content of text from your library. That means you don't have to use the exact language found in a text to find a cite.
To make this site widely available (i.e., let me run it from a free web server), the work is offloaded to your browser. This means you'll have to reload a bunch of stuff every time you load this page. So you might consider leaving this tab open. ;)
Word2Vec
To search across semantic content, we transform words into numbers using a tool called Word2Vec. This lets us use math to compare how similar text in your library is to your query. To learn more, check out this video lesson on Word2Vec. Load Word2Vec to proceed.
Simple Citation Search Alpha
This tool is not as refined as the search below, but since we have your library loaded we can do a quick scan for things that resemble citations and use them to seed a list of custom search links. This method is sure to miss the majority of citations. Once you see the results, I don't think you'll make this mistake, but do NOT rely on this as a comprehensive list. You may skip this section and go right to Search. That's the real power tool here. This section is more aspirational placeholder.
Search
This search will do its best to match the semantic content of the text you input with text in your library. For the best results, write your query/proposition as a full sentence. Because the work is being done by your browser, and I didn't want to overload it, this tool only knows 25,000 words. So, the search can be slow for big libraries, and matches aren't perfect. That being said, this search beats a simple "find this phrase" or "find these words" search, and it's free. So there's that.
Similarity Cutoff: 70%