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The data behind this academy
Every path, lesson and troubleshooting flow here traces back to an analysis of 145 real, public Zotero support questions — collected from the Zotero forums and the official knowledge base on 2026-10-25. This page summarizes the method; the full analysis lives in the repository (analysis/support-analysis.md, with the row-level data in analysis/support-questions.csv).
What was collected
- 131 public forum threads and 14 official knowledge-base topics — 145 rows
- Every question paraphrased (never copied), no usernames collected, thread URL and access date recorded for every row
- A 23-row URL sample re-verified: all resolve
How it was coded
Each row was coded three ways: by category (11 categories, from browser connector to groups), by lifecycle stage (day 1 / week 1 / month 1+), and by fix route — the customer-education version of “is it training?”:
| Fix route | Meaning | Share of 128 questions+bugs |
|---|---|---|
| Education | A knowledge or workflow gap the academy can fix | 31% |
| Both | Documented behavior education can help users avoid | 9% |
| Product / bug | Needs the product team or a genuine bug report | 60% |
(17 feature requests were logged but excluded from the knowledge-gap analysis.)
Headline findings
- Five categories hold 62% of the questions: browser connector & saving (20), PDF reader & annotations (16), sync & storage (16), word processor plugin (15), citations & styles (13).
- 40% of questions (51 of 128) were education-fixable — and citations & citation styles is the most education-heavy category of all (12 of its 13 questions: 7 knowledge gaps + 5 documented-but-avoidable behaviors).
- Problems skew late: 77% of forum questions came from month-1+ users. Week-1 questions cluster on the connector and the Word plugin — exactly where the academy front-loads its two main paths.
What the academy does with it
- The top 5 issues → the troubleshooting tool, one flow each
- The top knowledge gaps → the three learning paths and the two job aids
- The lifecycle distribution → the activation milestone model (M1 first capture → M3 first citation → M5 sync)
Limitations — read before citing
- Forum posters are a biased sample: people with problems, motivated enough to post, mostly established users (76.6% of questions came from month-1+ users), skewing English-speaking. Day-1 difficulty is almost certainly understated.
- Volume is not incidence.
- One coder, one pass — no inter-rater reliability was computed.
- A snapshot (collected 2026-10-25), not a census of a defined period.
The full statement is in the analysis document.