Searching by Source Type (Journal Article / Book, etc.)

treetag

It would be great to be able to search only for journal articles or books with certain characteristics. I collect both scholarly and non-scholarly resources and would like to be able to search by type of source.

dstillman

Could you clarify this? What do you want to search for, exactly?

treetag

Generate a list of journal articles with a particular tag. Or all journal articles in a particular subcollection. (Excluding other kinds of resources -- web pages, newspaper articles, etc.)

Journal articles and books are what one uses to write the literature review in a scholarly article. However, I also have many newspaper articles because I do research on a current issue. Sometimes, I just want to see the stuff in journals and not wade through the newspaper articles. So I'm looking for a field that lets me specify "Reference Type"..

Does that make sense? Can one already do this?

sybille

Have you tried using Advanced Search?

There's a screencast that demonstrates how it works:
http://www.zotero.org/documentation/advanced_search_screencast

treetag

I looked again at advanced search, thinking it didn't have reference type as a field and noticed that there is indeed a field called item type which is what I want. (I do use advanced search all the time).

Ok... Great! Requests withdrawn. Although, I would like to point out that academics would be more likely to refer to an entry as "reference" or a "source," not an "item." Item sounds more like database-y jargon:-) Something to keep in mind while writing the documentation...