Upgrade StorageDocumentation on "Related" feature
Greetings: I would like to see in the main documentation an entry discussing the tab labeled "Related." (The other three tabs, Info, Notes, and Tags, each have an article.) Clearly, by experimentation one can learn that one item in a collection can be associated with another item, but to what end? Exactly what kind of relationship is being established? What are the best practices for using this feature? It is unclear to this user, and there are no articles in either the kb or main documentation.
What there is as best practices in the documentation is almost entirely community generated.
I haven't heard of much people using the feature - it might become more important in a social media context - right now to me it essentially links items that somehow "belong" together.
So I don't see it as a social feature at all-- it's a catch-all glue that can span the collection and tag boundaries to pull together items that have a specific connection.
On the use of the "Related" feature: the two differences of opinion illustrate my confusion, and no doubt that of other users. Is there a programmer out there who can comment on what it was intended to be? I like what ajlyon is after, but this doesn't seem to be the most efficient way to deploy cross-references in a Zotero collection. But I should probably start a new thread about this, so it doesn't get buried by a misleading subject line.
The relations in a Zotero library are in fact quite useful-- so long as I make note of the reference in my notes on a given item. They are not useful without annotation, since they could mean anything. I wish I could make links (relations) from within notes, and that the relations could be summarized somewhere (a graph? collections of connected items?). All that said, I'd be interested to hear how others are using the related items feature-- I had assumed that everyone uses it just the same way.
In most cases I don't think the documentation is the place to suggest how people should use a feature - e.g. people use the combination of tags and collections in very different ways and that's perfectly fine - write what it does and everyone will figure out how it fits with her/his needs.
I'm using the "related" feature to connect legal cases together, or articles and legal cases they comment.
1. to connect book chapters to their parent volume
2. to connect book reviews to the reviewed book
3. to connect different incarnations of a work (e.g. an article that later became a book chapter, or the 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition of a work)
3. to connect my notes to each other, when they make related points
4. to connect my notes to another item than their parent item, if they make a point to which that other item is relevant
(In order of decreasing importance/frequency.)
I find the related feature quite handy, though I recall several threads around here about possible improvements (hierarchical relations, obviously; but also such simple things as more disambiguating information — the latter is especially useful for use cases like my case 3).