How do I search in Zotero?

Last reviewed: September 28, 2026 · Markdown version

Click in the search box at the top right of the centre pane (or press Ctrl/Cmd-F) and start typing — then check which mode it is in. Only the mode called "Everything" looks at the text inside your PDFs. Everything below is from Zotero's own documentation, which describes the desktop app.

The three quick-search modes

Zotero's searching guide lists them:

"Title, Year, Creator" — "matches against these three fields, as well as publication titles".
"All Fields & Tags" — "matches against all fields, as well as tags and text in notes".
"Everything" — "matches against all fields, tags, text in notes, and indexed text in PDFs".

Results filter as you type. In a very large library that can drag, and the guide's fix is to type a quotation mark at the very start of the search field, which "causes the search to start only when you type Enter / Return" (Searching — Zotero Documentation, read 28 September 2026).

Advanced search, wildcards and saved searches

The magnifying-glass icon at the top of the centre pane opens Advanced Search, where you filter by specific fields, item type or collection, and switch "Match" from all criteria to "any". Two details from the same guide are worth knowing. The percent sign is the wildcard: "the search term “W% Shakespeare” will match “W Shakespeare”, “W. Shakespeare” as well as “William Shakespeare”." And the search runs in one library at a time: "It is not currently possible to search in multiple libraries at one time."

Save an advanced search and it becomes a collection-like entry that keeps itself current — "Saved searches only store the search criteria, not the search results" — so a saved search for items added in the last seven days is always the last seven days. For logic the search window cannot express, such as (a OR b) AND (c OR d), the guide's method is to build two saved searches and then search for items in both (Searching — Zotero Documentation, read 28 September 2026).

Searching inside the PDFs: the full-text index

Zotero does not read a PDF at search time; it builds an index first. "Indexing happens automatically in the background when Zotero is idle", and the indexed text is searchable from Quick Search on "Everything" or from Advanced Search under "Attachment Content".

The detail that explains most "it isn't finding it" reports is the limit. How much of each file gets indexed is set in the Search pane of Zotero's settings, and the guide gives the default as "500000 characters, 100 pages". A 300-page book, on those defaults, is only partly searchable, and a phrase from chapter nine may simply not be in the index. You can check any attachment's "Indexed:" field in the right-hand pane, rebuild an item with "Reindex Item", or raise the limits and use "Rebuild Index…" (Searching — Zotero Documentation, read 28 September 2026).

Two file-type limits from the same page: "only PDF/EPUB/HTML full text content (and plain text files) can be indexed by Zotero", so .docx and .odt attachments are never searched by content.

When a PDF still doesn't show up

Zotero's troubleshooting advice is to "verify that the item has searchable text and that the text is properly stored in the PDF (e.g., try to copy text out of the document and ensure that it is high quality)" (Searching — Zotero Documentation, read 28 September 2026). If you cannot select any text, you are looking at a scanned image of a page. The searching guide and Zotero's full-text indexing page, which says Zotero "uses tools from the Xpdf project to extract full-text content from PDFs" (PDF Full-Text Indexing — Zotero Documentation, read 28 September 2026), are both silent on OCR — neither describes Zotero turning a scan into text. So a scan needs a text layer added before Zotero can index it: how to tell whether a PDF has real text, and how to add it. Once it has one, "Reindex Item" picks it up.