Notes and tags

shel

I have not been able to print notes that are attached to books, articles, collections, etc. When, for example, I click create bibliography for a book that has several notes attached to it, the book citation prints but the notes do not. I've also tried to use export citation but nothing happens at all in that case. I use linux, if that matters.

Also, is there a way to print just notes? Could I search for all notes tagged "doodads," for example, and then print the resulting notes, including citations? Right now, if I try to create a biblio, etc., from a note I get a message telling me that I have tried to create a bibliography without selecting a reference. Please select a reference.

I assume that since Zotero is based sqlite that it would be possible to link the notes more firmly to the references so that to print one you print all. Thanks.

dancohen

Thanks for the suggestion--duly noted. (I've moved your message over into the Feature Requests section, by the way) This is definitely something that is possible to do, and we have not yet emphasized tools for printing (aside from exporting to a bibliography, which can of course be printed).

shel

Thanks. I really think adding this ability would make Zotero a killer app for Firefox. Not to mention it would make Endnote, Procite, etc., out of business.

I have discussed for years with colleagues and students the shortcomings of various notetaking packages. Expense, steep-learning curve, complexity overkill, basically have been the most cited complaints. Even the CHNM's Scribe was not used by many people I knew because it was too difficult to figure out and often didn't do very simple tasks well . These basic tasks everyone I've talked with over the years are quite simple and replicate the 3x5 index card system:

1. Easily enter bibliographical info (automatic entery directly from online catalog is obviously best).
2. take notes from each bibliographical entry
3. be able to organize/sort these notes by keyword or subject
4. print these sorted notes, with footnote/endnote references, to form the structure or outline of the manuscript
5. portability to move notes, etc., from machine to machine.

Since Hypercard first came out as standard part of the Mac, I've just created my own databases to do these basics, though all have a lot of problems. That's why it will be great if Zotero can accomplish this eventually.

erazlogo

it would be nice to add a field for page number to notes so one could sort notes by page no and export footnote references correctly

leeleeradio

I would love to have a page number field as well. I'm already in love with Zotero and am confident that it will get better. I can't feel confident that it's the best note-taking app yet. Does Zotero export using a standard that other apps (like Scribe) can understand?

erazlogo

the new version of scribe can import references from zotero (exported in RIS format)

jsapovits

Just finished writing my first paper with Zotero and I was quite happy with the process but I do have some suggestions for the notes section to elaborate on what was posted previously.

A print note option would be most welcome. I wound up cut and pasting the notes I created into a separate Open Office document from the one I was using for my paper and then printing this.

One reason I had to do this is when I was working on a section of my paper I would open all of the notes related to that section in their individual separate windows. One problem -- 17 of my Firefox windows were all labeled "Edit Note" and I couldn't tell one window from the next without actually going into them.

I'll throw out some different suggestions since I know everyone puts a paper together differently:

1)When the notes are opened in a separate window rather than title the window "Edit Note" use some feature that makes them unique. In my case I was using journal articles so the title (or at least a portion since mine were medically related and long at times) could show in the window title.
2)Allow the option of opening notes in tabs (one of the reasons I've been using Firefox). One of the nice things about opening notes in tabs is there are a lot of add-ons which would complement Zotero nicely. For example I use Colorful Tabs to give each of my tabs another color. There's another add-on (I'm not sure which one) which allows "snapshot" views of several open tabs at once (also a feature of IE7). This feature would be really nice for looking at several open notes at one time. In this way you could leaf through them like you do index cards or notes.

Hope this helps! Thanks!

gm

A couple of small things.

Is there any way to reorder notes? I am importing from EndNote and I like the abstract to be the first note, but the note order doesn't seem always to be stable. Also, selecting and replacing the entire text of a note apparently moves it to the bottom.

If I have a search selected and I am editing a note "in place" (not in a separate window), the right-hand panel often closes suddenly, leaving the message "no items selected". Is this because the search key didn't appear in the note?

gm

On tags (also authors and other lists maintained by Zotero).

If I mistype a tag, author, etc., it seems to hang round forever. Is there any way of getting rid of a spurious tag? Is there any way of exporting the list of all tags, or all authors, etc?

lemmo

Just dragging this post up again after doing a search... are there plans to enable printing notes, tags or related items? Or to be able to import/export these?

Also, it would be great to have a way to easily see whether there are notes or tags in a reference, perhaps displayed as a column in the centre pane. This would give a quick easy indication whether you have forgotten to add tags to a reference.

More broadly, are notes, tags and related actually fields? and can they be linked to RIS fields to allow import/export?

thanks :)

adamsmith

tags are exported as KW in RIS and I believe notes go in one of the N fields - just try it out.
You can also print notes and tags using the generate report function, which I don't think existed in 2006.

lemmo

Thanks Adam, yes that's great, although the Related field is not exported... shame, is their another RIS note field that could be used for this?

Any info on whether Zotero could display notes and tags as a column in the centre pane? This would give a quick easy indication whether you have forgotten to add tags to a reference.

thanks

adamsmith

that's why there is a tab on the right - if you have that selected and scroll through the items in the center, you can see if you have tags.
Tags and notes in the center - I don't see that working GUI-wise. What would it be? Just another column with a plus?

lemmo

You could display the tags themselves, and just expand the column out if you want to view them all. As you already provide the option to display any or all of these columns, users can decide whether or not to display tags. But it would give a much quicker visual check than scrolling through all your records, would you agree?

Devin Roza

Hi guys. I love Zotero, just would love to see more features on the NOTES part:

1. Page number should be a field in the Note. Then, feature to sort by page number the notes.
2. On the Word add-in, I would like a button to add a Note to the TEXT, with the corresponding footnote / endnote added as well. Currently to get a note into the text I need to drag the note from Zotero to the document, then select the insert citation button. Or, you could have an option so that when the citation you are inserting is a Note, the note gets pasted there, plus the footnote / endnote (which automatically reads the page number from the Note).

yayoi

Hi everyone,

One feature mentioned in this thread from 2006 that I would still really love to see is the ability to reorder notes. Right now there is apparently no way to move around any of the child items (attachments, notes) under an entry and this would be very helpful for organizational purposes.

fbennett

A lightweight solution to this (which does require some changes in Zotero) may lie in enchanced "Scan" capability. The idea would be to drag and drop a plain text "citation" that contains a Zotero database link into and external document. Just about every tool out there supports simple links, so this would integrate tools like Notational Velocity, Word outline mode or the Emacs org-mode outliner into a Zotero workflow, without major changes to Zotero itself.

Since the links would identify Zotero references unambiguously, it would be relatively easy to convert them into Zotero citations when the external notes are later assembled into a word processor document. I recently posted some ideas about how this might work here, and a couple of us are quite excited about the possibilities it opens up.

This is still some distance away from implementation in Zotero, but it does seem like a promising approach that would address this issue.