Upgrade StorageFeature proposal/concept: Better database management/maintenance functionality
I switched to Zotero when version 6 came out, leaving my long used older reference manager Citavi behind.
That one big thing that made me hesitate a really (i mean really) loooooong time before finally switching to Zotero is the superb database management and maintenance functionality of Citavi called "Lists". Lists are a superb tool to get a perfect overview of the database and to do database maintenance (deduplication, consolidation, etc.).
Screenshot 1 shows that Citavi has lists for a variety of things, like "Persons and organizations" for example.
Screenshot 2 shows my list of "Persons and authors".
Advantage 1: In this list you can easily see that the person/author "Goethe" exists twice in my authors list. Duplications, incorrectly written and/or incomplete written names are a bad thing.
Advantage 2: To easily consolidate all books under the complete/correct name "Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von" I can simply drag all the references onto that name and they are updated accordingly, no need to do that manually for every single reference.
Advantage 3: If I wanted to rename "Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von" at some point in the future, then all the references inside that author are updated accordingly, again no need to do that manually for every single reference.
Please add such a functionality to Zotero as well, because right now Zotero is lacking that. And to manually edit some cryptic Zotero database file is no user friendly or versatile way.
Screenshot 1
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u15932215/3xru580n3d7rdi9eoq1b.png
Screenshot 2:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u15932215/cltk49eflkcxc6ee24hp.png
That one big thing that made me hesitate a really (i mean really) loooooong time before finally switching to Zotero is the superb database management and maintenance functionality of Citavi called "Lists". Lists are a superb tool to get a perfect overview of the database and to do database maintenance (deduplication, consolidation, etc.).
Screenshot 1 shows that Citavi has lists for a variety of things, like "Persons and organizations" for example.
Screenshot 2 shows my list of "Persons and authors".
Advantage 1: In this list you can easily see that the person/author "Goethe" exists twice in my authors list. Duplications, incorrectly written and/or incomplete written names are a bad thing.
Advantage 2: To easily consolidate all books under the complete/correct name "Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von" I can simply drag all the references onto that name and they are updated accordingly, no need to do that manually for every single reference.
Advantage 3: If I wanted to rename "Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von" at some point in the future, then all the references inside that author are updated accordingly, again no need to do that manually for every single reference.
Please add such a functionality to Zotero as well, because right now Zotero is lacking that. And to manually edit some cryptic Zotero database file is no user friendly or versatile way.
Screenshot 1
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u15932215/3xru580n3d7rdi9eoq1b.png
Screenshot 2:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u15932215/cltk49eflkcxc6ee24hp.png
