Case Sensitivity of Tags - Zotero Make up your Mind

Oddible

There is a problem with the way Zotero handles case sensitivity of tags. If you have the same tag listed in multiple references but with different capitalization, for instance "Immersion" and "immersion", when you click either tag from the tag cloud, it will show all items which are tagged with either capitalization. This is great. However, there are two words in my tag cloud taking up space.

So I renamed all of my tagged references from lower case to upper case - they all now say "Immersion". The old "immersion" still shows up in the tag cloud. Thinking it was a distinct entry - since it shows up separately in the tag cloud, I right-clicked on it and selected Delete Tag. Unfortunately this not only deleted the lower case tag "immersion" it also deleted the upper case tag "Immersion" so now there are zero references with that tag, all of my work has been lost.

If Zotero is going to maintain distinct entries in the tag cloud, then deletion from the tag cloud should also be distinct to the case-sensitive values and should not delete both cases.

dstillman

You shouldn't be able to have the same tag with different capitalizations.

Can you reproduce (and, more importantly, provide steps to do so)?

Oddible

I believe this is happening when there is a user-created tag with one capitalization and an imported tag (for instance from ACM) with a different capitalization. When I try to manually put in two tags of different capitalization it corrects it.

pjalet

I confirm this issue (and the way it happens). Tag importation seem to be case sensitive, whereas manual entry is indeed case insensitive (i.e., it automatically falls back to the existing capitalisation if the tag already exists).

ayuroman

Zotero blows my mind with that stupid system: for example, I exported 4 articles from pubmed with same words in tag, but with different capitalization. So in Zotero now I have 4 different tags:
Tau protein
tau Protein
tau protein
Tau Protein

adamsmith

Zotero doesn't touch PubMed tags, though, so that would be more likely in their data (though I find that surprising)

ayuroman

I don't understand, why Zotero identifies same words with different capitalisation as different tags

Gurdas_Sandhu

@dstillman

I too am facing the tag capitalisation issue and hoping this can be resolved in the near future. Another thread where this is discussed:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/300210

For example, I have an item with the auto-tag "Acetylene". I can add a user-tag "acetylene" to this item and they are treated as separate. Or, I can create two user tags "Ethane" and "ethane" and they are treated as separate. However, the tag window (in standalone and online) will find both occurrences when you type just one (so that a good thing).