Add Multiple Items by Identifier

Leonard Wamakote

The addition of items by identifier such as ISBN is a cute innovation in Zotero 2.0. I wish it were possible to add multiple items at one go (e.g. a list of ISBNs, perhaps comma separated).

dstillman

This is planned.

Leonard Wamakote

Any update on this? If done, how do I add a list of identifiers, e.g. a list of comma-separated ISBNs, at once?

theozh

Any progress on that topic?
I have a large list of DOIs... and it would be nice to add them all at once and not one by one...

aurimas

We can probably make an import translator that could import lists of identifiers from files. Though we would need some way to identify such files and possibly specify the identifier type.

A unique header like "IDENTIFIER_LIST DOI" followed by a new line-separated list of DOIs should be manageable. We could support multiple identifiers like that.

dstillman

I don't think it makes sense to come up with some arbitrary format for this. The UI should just support it.

aurimas

I guess we can just make the magic wand text box expandable into a multi-line box, since comma separated DOIs would not work. Unless you want to split by space. IMO new line would make sense.

dstillman

It can split by any whitespace.

dstillman

Or it could just pull out DOIs from the pasted content, as the DOI translator does. We've talked about supporting this via the browser context menu as well, which would do the same thing.

adamsmith

any reason _not_ to (also) accept space?
Why not use [\s\n]+

aurimas

Spaces should be fine for DOI and PMID, but I was concerned about ISBNs. Clearly users tend to paste ISBNs with spaces, since Simon recently pushed a patch to remove spaces from ISBN

Unless, of course, you don't want to use the magic wand box for this.

dstillman

I do.

If the potential spaces in ISBNs are in consistent places, we could just add those into the regexp and still pull all three types of ids out from the pasted content.

efessee

Would still be helpful!

dstillman

@schierf: This has been possible since 2012.