Nesting Entries

JeffreyS

I am totally sold on Zotero and cannot wait until the many potentials that have been discussed arrive. I appreciate all of you programming savvy individuals who are contributing to this effort.

But a quick question?
Is there any way to nest one entry within another. I often want to have a main entry for an article or book that is of particular interest, but if I find a review of the book or a "response" to the article I would like to have it nested within the primary article.

An alternative, although still not preferred is if the "related" tab actually connected to a hierarchical tree of some sort.

Perhaps this is not even an "alternative" but an additional feature I would like to see. One could even imagine different kinds of "relations" to create a web between entries. Although I am not sure Zotero is the appropriate platform for that project.

Thanks.

Tjowens

Hierarchical items are indeed part of the plan.

See
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1317/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/391/

bdarcus

Except that "hierarchical items" as we've previously discussed them has not included anything other than component parts (chapters, etc.). It seems to me what JeffryS is asking for is rather different, and rather more complicated (for example, I'm not sure I want every related item nested in my table view; that's a rather different kind of metaphor).

dstillman

Yeah, I think the closest solution will be more descriptive relations between items. Once those exist, various visualizations are possible, though I'm not sure nesting in the items list would be among them.

JeffreyS

Thank you for your responses.

I had several different things going on.
My first and primary interest is on the practical level of use the way Zotero is set up right now. I really wish that I could have one "item" be an object in another (similar to the way attachments are nested under an "item". My example is my primary interest in this. I often look at/download reviews of books in journals, and encyclopedic entries like wikipedia, that relate to my primary article or book entry. Most of the time these secondary items will never be an item of interest in and of themselves and I would rather they were treated like an "attachment" rather than their own item. That way when I click a particular book, I see the attachments including the book review associated. Right Now I generally just copy the pdf of the page, or the wikipedia entry as an attachment, but it would be nice to retain the bibliographic material as well.

I understand the problems with the hierarchical vs. flat structure confound this in the simple sense right now. But would it be possible to have an info subwindow that captured fields, or could even be manually entered instead of the simple blank box for writing notes that is under the attachment info?

JeffreyS

Following the other trail, I like the semantic relations and extended connections model that Zotero might become. I have never used any mind-mapping software or complex networking of items software, but if there was a intuitive way to connect these kinds of tools with the ris or openurl or whatever elements that makes Zotero a time saver that would be excellent.