Upgrade StorageQuestions frm th FrontLine of the "Battle of Information Overload" (BIO?Life in the Era of Data?)
Greetings,
Although Zotero has been on my hard drive for some time now, I mostly used it to store webpages, developing folders/collections as necessary. Recently, I have been exploring possibilities of greater integration, functionality, and so forth. I installed Mendeley, JabRef, and Benubird. Each has qualities.
Is there a way, in Zotero, of filtering "uncollected" items from those in collections? The total of "My Library" exceeds the total of collection items. This excess does not appear in Mendeley's Zotero imports. I have created "parent items" for all items saved by earlier Zotero versions- they weren't indexed. It seems, though, that some have been missed. They appear, numerically, at least, in the "My Library" folder [visually, too, because I found one and indexed it, the numeric excess adjusted to reflect this], so if there is a way of filtering out all indexed-collected items, that would leave the excess documents, which could then be inserted into 'indexable' document-templates.
If anyone has any ideas, it would be helpful, there are 1586 items.
Thanks in advance.
Although Zotero has been on my hard drive for some time now, I mostly used it to store webpages, developing folders/collections as necessary. Recently, I have been exploring possibilities of greater integration, functionality, and so forth. I installed Mendeley, JabRef, and Benubird. Each has qualities.
Is there a way, in Zotero, of filtering "uncollected" items from those in collections? The total of "My Library" exceeds the total of collection items. This excess does not appear in Mendeley's Zotero imports. I have created "parent items" for all items saved by earlier Zotero versions- they weren't indexed. It seems, though, that some have been missed. They appear, numerically, at least, in the "My Library" folder [visually, too, because I found one and indexed it, the numeric excess adjusted to reflect this], so if there is a way of filtering out all indexed-collected items, that would leave the excess documents, which could then be inserted into 'indexable' document-templates.
If anyone has any ideas, it would be helpful, there are 1586 items.
Thanks in advance.
The ability to search for "unfiled" items not in any collection is planned, but currently only available via a clumsy work-around - namely creating a long string of search conditions with "is not" and "collection name" for all of your collections and combining them with "Match All"
The initial problem was that Mendeley wasn't seeing certain Zotero items accessed before its installation. In particular, those saved by earlier versions of Zotero, and not contained by a "parent" item, characterised by a "+" sign to the left. Zotero does this by default now.
So I did batch creations of "parent" items, and Mendeley was able to see them.
However, since my last post, after trying BibTeX exports to JabRef, hoping to use its duplicate functionalities to attain the whereabouts of the excess items, I also tried deleting certain Mendeley collections, hoping to achieve the same result. Both procedures were inspired by a vague notion that some kind of boolean differential logic would emerge out of my stumblings.
Anyhow, now Mendeley isn't synchronised with the vast majority of the Zotero library at all. Only with certain newly saved items. If I change older items, Mendeley's corresponding copies are inert.
Perhaps I should reinstall Mendeley?
Personally I think the difficulties of running two citation managers far outweigh the benefits of (rather limited in Mendeley's case) additional functionality, but that's a matter of taste and your call.
I am quite happy with Zotero. It has qualities none of the others seem to have. And I've just found out how easy it is to import local documents into Zotero, you can do them in batches as well. That is what I was looking for, the ability to see and search all documents, webpages and local, from one application. So Zotero can do that it seems.
Mendeley provides a nice supplement insofar as it's a standalone programme with a different user interface that lends different perspectives.
I have contacted Mendeley Support a few days back, they replied promptly, requesting information and files, which I supplied. Haven't heard from them since. If their sync with Zotero doesn't work properly, the programme isn't much use to me.