Zotero workflow

RonBurk

Although the word "workflow" often appears in Zotero reviews, I ironically find it has less explicit workflow features than I expected. For example, I often find references that I won't be able to look up until my next trip to the library (due to not living at a university, and DRM that restricts to local university networks). So, part of my workflow often involves creating a partial citation, and adding it to the list of "Things to Download" when I next travel to the library.

Since I don't see any explicit workflow features, I'm assuming that I would implement this with tags. E.g., mark citations for articles waiting to be downloaded with a tag like "workflow:download", which would let me easily get my "Things to Download" list once I arrived at the library. Once downloaded, that tag would get removed, and perhaps another tag added to indicate the next state in the workflow.

Is that more or less the way that other users implement workflow states when using Zotero?

raf

Unless I did not discover a better way of doing this, I often work along very similar lines. Another way of organising your workflow could be to make a separate collection in the left-hand pane, called "work-collection," or "workflow:download."

The tagging feature and the collections feature work very similar, I think. To organise certain items in a collection "workflow:download" is very similar (as far as I know) to assigning the tag "workflow:download" to these items.

The advantage of collections is that you can make sub-collections. But then again, each further level of organisation can also be achieved by adding additional tags.