Extra columns: "Number of GS citations" and "Number of pages"

z8080

I wanted to know which of several papers in my Zotero library has the highest number of citations in Google Scholar, and I had to do that research manually - I suggest adding a column (alongside the already available ones: Creator, Year, Publisher, etc) that fetches this information and displays it for all items where it is available (where it is not, a question mark can be displayed, for instance).

It would also be very useful to have a column displaying the number of pages that PDF attachments have.

Hope the developers will consider this. Thanks!

adamsmith

there is this
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/zotero-scholar-citations/
though it's not official and not necessarily recommended

z8080

Thanks, I installed that add-on and it seems to be working fine. Unfortunately I could not find one for my second suggestion (number of pages in attached PDF), but hopefully this will at one point be implemented in Zotero itself rather than having to use an external add-on.

z8080

I was wondering if my second suggestion (having a column in the Zotero list that displays the number of pages in an attached PDF) was taken into consideration by the developers. I still think it would be a very good thing to implement (and not too difficult), because it allows you to more easily identify papers by their number of pages at a glance, from the library list, rather than having to open each PDF.

mark

But why would you want to identify papers by their number of pages? Or do you mean by their page numbers? (That is becoming increasinly irrelevant BTW as the publishing world moves to a DOI- rather than a page-based model for identifiers.)

z8080

Several scenarios: I might remember that I read a paper that was 10 pages long, and knowing this helps me narrow down my list (in addition to using labels, etc) to find it faster; I might want to select a paper to read on a plane that is under my "To read" label and that isn't longer than 20 pages because the flight is short; I might want to be able to quickly see PDFs that are just one page long as opposed to "regular" (multi-page) PDFs, etc etc

adamgolding

I second this request--many people complain that PDFs lack the immediacy of paper documents, and this is partially because of the lack of a visual impression of the overall size of a document.

mark

I like the points by longtalker & adamgolding and I can see the use of an optional column for number of pages in pdf.

Gracile

On the question: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/17725/allow-more-fields-to-be-presentedsorted-in-middle-pane/ and http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/10011/sorting-items-by-court-in-middle-pane
Developers have other priorities but I think this is not hard to add for someone with developing skills?

adamsmith

@gracile - these are two different issues, though:
Unless I'm misunderstanding, longtalker and adamgolding suggest a new field, to be automatically created (?) from the PDF.
That would actually probably not be trivial to implement, because it involves not just getting the infor (which I think pdfinfo can do), but also displaying it somewhere, integrating it in the Zotero database structure so that it's searchable etc.

The threads you link to want more existing fields available in the central column - that can't be very hard to do, requires no database changes, and I think it has broad support.
We should probably make that one of the papercut issues (feel free to go ahead if you have the time).

Gracile

Oh.. are you sure? Sorry, I was misled by the title of the thread and the messages talking of "column".
[+1 for papercut indeed]