Move Citation Key back to top

PChemist
edited February 16, 2025
Move Citation Key back to top. Even though this field is mostly meaningless to the user, it does not take much space and helps to see immediately if the record migth by a dupicate. In Zotero 7, this field is buried at the bottom of the Item pane.
  • adamsmith
    The citation key is a feature of the BBT add-on, not Zotero; I understand the dev is planning to move it back up to the top, but with the changes of the item pane it hasn't been trivial (and initially wasn't possible). FWIW, if you're concerned about duplicate,s the Zoplicate add-on might be a better solution than manually scanning citekeys.
  • macrospect
    It looks unfortunately like this field was ultimately moved to the top of the item pane. I know that many users wanted it there, for reasons I don't fully understand. But I have no use for it, and I'm sure others also don't, and it makes it very hard to see at a glance the info you actually want: the title, author, etc. It's quite counter-intuitive to put a technical field at the top, for the average user. Would it be possible to just allow users to move the ordering of this field as we please?
  • adamsmith
    If you're seeing that field at the top (or seeing it at all for item types other than dataset, preprint, and standard) you have the Better BibTeX (BBT) plugin installed. As the citekey is a central element for the type of writing BBT is meant to support, it makes a lot of sense to have it at the top (and custom ordering is much harder, especially for a plugin).
    If you don't have any need for a citekey, there's a good chance you don't actually want BBT and should uninstall the plugin.
  • macrospect
    Thank you for the reply. I need BBT because it feeds another note-taking plugin I use--it creates the titles for notes that I sync between Zotero and Obsidian. But all of this happens under the hood--I never need to look at the citekey myself. I imagine the same may be true for other users who use either my notes plugin or others. So if there is any way to make the order of this field changeable by the user, I would be super grateful!
  • adamsmith
    You'd have to ask the developer on GitHub, but you'd have to accept that it's not what he wrote the plug-in for
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited 6 days ago
    To have the field moveable would require a zotero change, but I'm not likely to change it from where it is. BBTs preference pane is too big as it is.

    I'm happy to have BBT be the base for citekey based integrations, but I've added several others that should really move to the zotero local API where they can. It's more well thought out, and while I do my best to optimize BBT, it's still a pretty heavyweight plugin if all you want is integration.
  • macrospect
    Okay, thank you for your consideration.
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