Search in Notes / Abstract

GeorgK

Hi,
maybe I am just to stupid to work it out, but:

When I do a search for a keyword in the text (not a "tag"), I only get useable results for the title and the authors. When the keyword ist found in a note or abstract, I only get the abstract and the title. When I want to export this into a text file (or generate a report), it is even worse, because the program only gives me the note's text without any information to which source it belongs. So, once one has found his keyword in several abstracts, he has to go back "by hand" to combine it with title and authors for a useful print out.

If this is not just my mistake, but really a feature of this program, than it is a major drawback which - pardon me - would make this program almost useless for serious work with big collections of papers.

Best regards
Georg

dstillman

Please see:

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/55/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/245/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/274/

That first thread explains the inherent problems here. The others describe some features we've added to address the issue. Note that the feature mentioned in the third thread, clicking the title of the parent item at the top of the child note pane to jump to the parent, has been implemented on the development branch and will be in the next release.

It's possible there could be a way to toggle between the current behavior and a mode that always shows the child items in context (with the non-matching parent grayed out, as I suggested in that first thread, or some sort of marker to point to the matching items, as johnlknight suggested in the third), but we'd need a way to work such a toggle into the user interface.

We welcome any other suggestions you have.

GeorgK

Hello Dan,
thank you for your quick and helpful response. Sorry if I sounded a little bit harsh, but in my eyes this is really a "killer" to an otherwise excellent tool - at least for the average researcher in medicine and biology, who mainly collects abstracts via PubMed.

It was a good idea to add the title information in the notes window, but please keep in mind that most people sort (and often remember) their papers by authors' names. So there is still one step remaining to find the publication (or "parent file").

In my eyes, the simpliest solution would be to show a match in the notes together with the parent file. Just highlight the "daughter file" in this case, to make it clear where the searched term was found.

You should not worry to much about confusing people with double-hits (both in titel and notes). People who use such a tool are supposed to have a brain, so 100% fool-proof design is not the most important point.

Please also keep in mind that in science searching the abstracts (or notes) usually is much, much more important than searching the title. When you search for publications that cover a certain topic or method, you need to search the abstract, because the title is much to short to give you complete information about the content of a publication. Searching the title might be more important for people at archives or libraries.

Best regards
Georg

dstillman

Georg — thanks. Those are good points re: the different needs for the sciences from the social sciences. I don't think we can completely do away with the current functionality, though, since finding only notes, without parent items, may be a useful feature for certain workflows. This is why I suggested that we need a solution that allows the user to switch between both modes. For example, we could add a "Show matches in context" option to the context (right-click) menu in search panes, or we could add a drop-down element to "Search" next to the quicksearch field to let you change the mode (and add an equivalent option in the advanced search window). Alternatively, we could just make the quicksearch always show matches in context and add the option for advanced searches so that people could continue to create saved searches with just notes. The latter may be sufficient.

Also, when searching by abstract from the advanced search window, it may be appropriate to have it actually search for items containing matching abstracts, even if the abstracts are implemented as glorified notes, since the abstract, unlike notes, is really a property of the parent item.

GeorgK

Dan,
I think it its sufficient if this feature is included only in the "advanced search". This would keep the "quick search" as simple as possible, and would also avoid overloading of the toolbar.
Why not add a little clickbox to the "advanced search" window that says "Show only parent files"? It is not absolutely necessary to indicate by a tree where (notes, title, authors) the keyword was found; just filter out multiple hits. All I have to know in this case is that the keyword is found somewhere in the context of the parent file. Then simply right-klick to do a "Generate Report" on the search result, print it out, and - voila - I have a complete list on paper to work with it. This workflow would fit my needs perfectly (though I cannot talk for other users).

dstillman

On the development branch, abstracts have been changed to regular item fields (with the ability in the metadata pane to toggle between a cropped view of the abstract and a full expanded view) rather than glorified notes. This should eliminate most of the problems associated with searching for abstracts.