Zotero 7: search for tags in annotations

if87

Hi,
I think a major improvement would be the possibility to search for the annotations with a certain tag, and see directly the list of annotations in the results.
This could be a game-changer for researchers because it would allow to quickly highlight a passage related to a certain topic, tag it, and later find all the excerpts related to that topic.
Imagine if you write an article where you want to summarize all the different ways in which a certain concept was defined: you clic on that tag and you see a list of all the sentences tagged "That-Concept-Definition" that you have read in the last 10 years of research. And then maybe if you clic on each annotation you directly go to that part of the book/paper, to check the context. If this was possible... few clicks and your article is almost ready :)

If someone knows a workaround to achieve the same result, I would be extremely grateful!

dstillman

Yes, annotations will be shown directly in the items list in a future version, so you'll be able to search directly for tags.

Note that you can already search for annotation tags, though. They'll just match the parent attachments in the items list.

SteffenHe

+1. I would really like to see tags receiving the ability to list ALL the tagged lines/passages from PDFs, including files that have lines with this specific tag. Also, the ability to export this tag list, meaning the highlighted passage, quotation and annotation, would be highly appreciated! This is the only thing that I am missing regarding my Zotero workflow. Thank you very much!!

JoSimister

I can't help with this but I am posting to agree - this is a big gap in workflow and this facility would save enormous amounts of time.

seredes

@JoSimister, @SteffenHe I love Zotero and I use it everyday, but I just wanted to let you know, that Citavi can organize items by "category" and organize categories in an outline letting you "draft" a paper by ordering the annotations. The annotations stay linked to the papers. You can also add standalone notes, and reorder items within a category. Finally you can export everything in a text document. I usually get all my references in Zotero and then export them to Citavi (pretty easy, just a few clicks) and then work on the knowledge management in Citavi. I use the desktop version that is Windows only; there is also an online version but I don't know how well it works.

SteffenHe

@seredes
Thank you for your comment. Since Citavi does not offer a proper tablet app + support for Apple devices at all, it is not that interesting to me. I am wondering nevertheless, since this might be the solution until Zotero adds this feature as well: How are you exporting all your references from Zotero? What is the precise workflow? Thank you in advance.

if87

@seredes thank you, just a clarification: by saying "citavi can organize items by category" you mean that ANNOTATIONS can be organized by categories? Or just the papers, books etc.? Because in the latter case it is not clear to me how this is different from Zotero collections or tagging system.

if87

@dstillman any clue on when this feature will be released?

seredes

@if87, yes, I mean annotations can be organized by category, while still being linked to the papers, and the category structure can be organized in a paper outline (or any other kind of tree structure) and then exported. You can also add standalone notes to the tree structure, and dividers. See this link:
https://www1.citavi.com/sub/manual4/en/101_sorting_quotations_and_thoughts.html

naimfirat

For a while, I’ve been searching for a method to organize my annotations using tags similar to the way Citavi does.
I attempted to achieve this with Zotero but without success. I also tried Better Notes, but found it to be unintuitive and clunky. I then experimented with importing the notes into various PKM systems like Obsidian and Logseq, but these tools don’t automatically sort individual text blocks into new notes based on their assigned tags—requiring manual sorting, which is both time-consuming and prone to errors.

Finally, I discovered this Zotero add-on Ze-notes by frianasoa: https://github.com/frianasoa/Ze-Notes

It does exactly what I was looking for and has been a game-changer for me.

seredes

@naimfirat thanks for sharing!