[Idea] Introducing Hyperlinking and Tagging Enhancements to Zotero

YiqiaoWang0625

Hello Zotero Community,

I'm proposing a new function/plugin for Zotero to streamline our research organization, and I need advices for its feasibility and usefulness (illustration: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ndczft5t46l2docguy1qw/new-function_-1.png?rlkey=ycpzi2ltqdn9ccpxfwauha4op&dl=0):

Hyperlinked Folders: This feature would allow you to link subfolders within multiple parent folders. For example, a 'Dogs' subfolder could exist under both 'Friends' and 'Hunting' without duplicating content.

Global and Local Tags: Tags could be global (visible in all instances of a subfolder) or local (visible only within a specific instance). So, a 'Bolder Collie' could be tagged as 'favorite' in 'Friends/Dogs' and not show up in 'Hunting/Dogs'.

Network Visualization: A visual map to see how different topics interconnect through these hyperlinked subfolders, which would help in understanding the broader context of our research.

YiqiaoWang0625

First, let's imagine such a use case:

I need to write an essay about my friends. For this, I want to create a "Friend" folder to collect my references for this essay, so that all the files I need would be here and I don't need to look into my whole library to find what I need. So, I create subfolders of "Friend": "Friend/Neighbour/", "Friend/Schoolmate/" an so on. I don't have a dog, but I really want one to be my friend, so I also created an empty folder called "Friend/Dogs".

Then I started to research on dogs to find out my favorite type of dog, and I started my literature reviewing process of dog types. Eventually, the folder "dog" is filled with three items: Bolder Collie, Chihuahua and Shiba Inu. I found that Bolder Collie is my favorite dog, so I tagged it "favorite".

At the same time, I need to write an essay about Hunting, so I created another folder called "Hunting" to organize my references for this essay. Since dogs have long been helping human hunt, I need some references of dogs again. I remembered that I have done some reviews about dogs before, so I draged the ""Friend/Dogs" folder into "Hunting", and now it becomes "Hungting/Dogs". I know that Shiba Inu was used as hounds in Japan, so I tagged it "hound".

However, now that I have moved my folder from "Friend" to "Hunting", when I write the essay about friends, I need to open the "Hunting" folder to find my dog, which makes it unintuitive. Also, when I write the hunting essay, I found Bolder Collie tagged as "favorite", and it confuses me because human don't favor Bolder Collie as the best hounds.

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This is just a childish example, but it highlights the need for reusing existing folder structure "Dogs" in different research topics. Some people might prefer to organize their entire library according to their scientific relationship and always put "Dogs" under the folder "Animals". However, I found this hard for two reasons:

1. Whenever I open Zotero (I now have 1500+ items in various fields), I am faced with all the categories, from "life/Eukaryota/animals/Vertebrata/dogs/" to "Socialogy/Contemporary Socialogy/Urban Lifestyle/Neighbours", and this distracts my focus greatly.
2. Sometimes an item is just hard to categorized. What if my neighbours also have dogs? Should they be put into dogs or neighbours?

YiqiaoWang0625

Therefore, I suggest the following functionality (please have a look at my illustrations as well: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ndczft5t46l2docguy1qw/new-function_-1.png?rlkey=ycpzi2ltqdn9ccpxfwauha4op&dl=0):

1. Hyperlinked Folders: Enable subfolders to be linked (not moved or copied) to multiple parent folders. This way, the 'Dogs' subfolder could be accessible under both 'Friends' and 'Hunting'.

2. Introduce tags that can be global or local to the hyperlink instance. The tag 'favorite' could remain local to 'Friends/Dogs', while 'hound' could be a local tag in 'Hunting/Dogs'.
'Smallest" could be assigned as global tag for Chihuahua and seen in all instances.

3. Network Visualization: Visualize folder structures as interconnected networks, illustrating shared references across different research topics. When I see the map where the dogs folder is so widely referenced in all my other folders, I might realize that I have talked so much about dogs, maybe I should really get one. :)

YiqiaoWang0625

Now I want to talk about the feasibility of this idea. I'm not a developer, nor an experienced programmer, but I noticed that items in Zotero can exist in multiple folder, and the storage of Zotero files doesn't include the file structure shown in Zotero.

This suggests that file structure of Zotero is not hard-coded in storage, but computed dynamically when running Zotero. Further, I imagine each item already has some kind of "folder tag" attributes that tells it to only appear in certain folders. If that's the case, hyperlinking folders are fundamentally adding another "folder-tag" to all the items in this folder and it will be relatively easy. What's harder might be to handle folders, as folder also needs to have a "folder-tag" to appear in multiple folders.

To go off from the topic, I want to share some of my personal thoughts in categorizing papers. Metaphysically, I would suggest to focus on the lowest level subfolder that actually contains items. These are "species" of ideas, with each individual item as an individual "being" of this species. In Taxonomy, species are considered as basic building blocks of the whole classification system. All higher level folders, or classes, are considered man-made, thus arbitrary and subjective; but species are normally considered as natural, deterministic and objective. Imagine a Zotero that functions exactly as I described, and users can just drag these "species" folders to form different networks of classification (https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/63toyi0wrlp48ccg1kll8/multi-cat.png?rlkey=jtkgxfv8h7pl9u6jfqvjdns69&dl=0).

YiqiaoWang0625

I think I just need advice on if this idea worths exploring or not. Anyone sharing some thoughts?