Request for setting sort order(Author's name, Paper's title, etc) for every categories

Julian_cas

Hi,

Recently, I found it is inconvenient that, when I changed the sort order in a single category, I changed the order for all categories. But I would like to sort items by author's name in a categories and sort others by paper's title or created time.

I think it would be nice to link the sort order to categories themselves rather than a global configure.

Best regards,
Jian

DWL-SDCA

I think that what you are requesting is for what I call primary, secondary, tertiary sort. There are times that I’d like to sort by created date (I sometimes wish to exclude the time but that is a different topic), then within that by journal title or by author name. These situations are rare for me but I understand the appeal.

Sometimes, it seems that sorting by one category keeps, say, the authors or journal titles in alphabetical order but I’m not sure of that because it doesn’t seem to always happen.

It would help me to know if there is an established sort pattern for, say, author names when the primary sort is by journal title.

elizabeth.austin

I'm understanding that Julian_cas is requesting to define sort order per COLLECTION, not category. I agree that it would be nice to define the item field columns visible and sort order per collection or *at least* per library. I realize this would also be annoying for many reasons for many people, so it would work better if it was an option in the user preferences — update column visibility and sort order individually per library, per collection, or globally across all libraries and collections.

mjthoraval

Here is the latest reply from Zotero developers I could find on this topic:

This is planned, but no ETA.

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/91277/sorting-items-within-collections-vs-global-sorting

There was also an earlier request that had received a reply with technical explanations:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/74297/different-orders-in-different-collections

The main user cases I have seen in my workflow so far are:

1) Separate sort order in the “Duplicate Items” collection, because it is the most convenient way to go through duplicates in the library:

It may be easier to see which items are selected if you sort the items by Title.

https://www.zotero.org/support/duplicate_detection

2) Sort options for Saved Searches: Typically, I would like to see the most recent publications on a certain topic when doing a literature review.

Implementing this feature for these special collections first might be the most convenient. It is already possible to edit the preferences of the Saved Searches collections from a right-click on the collection. So adding Saved Sort options to Saved Searches would probably be the easiest place to start adding sorting options.

But the more general sorting configuration per collection would also be useful eventually.