2026-02-26, 1021h, Setting up zotlit for zotero citations in Obsidian

In order to enrich my notes in a certain way, I need to figure out how I'm going to handle citations.

I was starting to use Zotero, toward the end of 2025, because extending out of critical theory into other sciences meant I was incorporating way more sources into any given piece of writing.

And, I'd figured out some way, if I recall, of exporting my Zotero bibliography to a single file, which my Org-mode files were able to draw on in such a way that when I published PDFs or HTML files, a bibliography was properly rendered at the bottom of the page.

I'm guessing, without going further into it, that the static site generator I'm using, Quartz, doesn't have an innate capability of doing something like that, because Obsidian doesn't. So I will probably have to divide this into a few chunks:

Getting my Zotero bibliography out of Zotero and someplace where my Obsidian vault can see it.

Getting my Obsidian notes to be able to treat those entries as some type of linkable thing.

Getting Quartz to render a bibliography of the citations used in a given note, when it's turned into a page.

I'm just assuming that getting Quartz to do that will require writing some new "component" for it, and I believe that'd require using JavaScript, so I'm comfortable postponing that for now. As-is, citations are just, broken or unavailable, and I receive few complaints, so the focus is very much on improving the research, not publishing, side of things.

When I took a brief look at this stuff last night, I found the Zotlit extension, which seems to be in that sweet spot of developed-enough, and still-actively-developing, that makes it a good choice.

I've just gone ahead and installed that, enabled it, configured "literature notes" to go into References and... testing something, here: [@emsenn_MolochsBargainNecessaryMisalignment_2025]

Yes, that seems to find things in my Zotero library seamlessly. And if I click through to that, it attempts to open the matching file in /References/ - creating it, since it didn't already exist. A bit of poking, and it seems like it finds the file via the citekey frontmatter, which means I'm free to change any other part of the file how I like. It also means, I think, that I can add things to that folder which aren't in my Zotero, i.e. [@emsenn_test_2026]

...Yes, but then I don't get autocomplete via Zotero's API. Fair enough.

And, this is actually without installing the plugin to Zotero.

I've now done that, and I see it gives me the ability to create or update a literature note from Obsidian. That's handy, because it means that - with some template tweaks, I believe - I can make my Obsidian notes have all the information I want from my Zotero stuff.

I'll have to actually try and fix up the citations in something, now, but that should be all I need to get set up to make citations work better, internally.

Since that was easier than expected, let me check what Quartz has to say about citations...

Surprising! There's a whole (short) page of documentation on the concept. It tells me that it's using Rehype-Citation, which I hadn't heard of before, but it looks like I might actually have functional citations now, without further configuration... Oh! Missed a line on the Quartz documentation: I have to learn how to enable the Citations plugin, which I think is explained on the Configuration docs.

So, this teaches me that plugins "act as a series of transformations over content," and fall into three categories: transformers, filters, and emitters. The Citation doc says it's a Transformer.

That means I'll be editing config.configuration.plugins.transformers in quartz.config.ts, in my Quartz instance.

Ahh - reading that Citations document more, it uses a local bibliography (.bib) file to find its citations, so I will have to remember to export my Zotero bibliography before building the site.

Having done that, I think I'm ready to try building the site...

...Which is throwing an error:

Failed to process html `content/Personal/Letters to the Web/2017-01-01, Public Posts Implicitly Endorse the Framework They Discuss.md`: Cannot read non valid bibliography URL in node env.
at trace (../util/trace.ts:37:11)
at ../processors/parse.ts:137:9

Checking the file which triggers the failure, I don't actually see any links at all, or even a @...

So I'm thinking perhaps which file it failed to process is irrelevant, and what matters is that the "bibliography URL" is invalid. I'm assuming that means the path to the bibliography file - let me double-check where documentation says it should be.

Ahh, "./bibliography.bib relative to the git source of the vault," but I think it might mean "relative to the git source of the Quartz instance," so I'm going to move the bibliography up a level, from the ./content/ directory where the Obsidian vault is, to ./ where Quartz is.

That seems to have done it! The site at least builds, and, if I look at this babble, yes! We get citations.

That was so much easier than I hoped.