"Or/Not" Feature for Tags

jbarth3

Hello, I'm a huge fan of zotero and recommend it to everyone I know. It's saved me a tremendous amount of time in the research stage for my dissertation.

There's one additional feature, though, that I think would make it even better. I'm not sure if you could manage this, but if you could, it would be a great help.

Zotero already has the ability to display notes that contain one tag AND another tag. But there's is no "or/not" feature. If I want to view notes which have "tag x" OR "tag y." Or if I want to view notes which have "tag x," but not any notes which have "tag x" and "tag x." A feature similar to some of the search engines for academic articles, or like the online newspaper archives at the LOC, with an or/not feature.

Is this something the zotero team would be interested in looking into?

Thanks!

adamsmith

The advanced search can do all that - as far as I can see the only thing that you can't do is to combine "AND" and "OR" (i.e you can do
A * B, A + B, A * b but not A*B + C
(where * is boolean and, + is or, small letter is "is not")

dstillman

In theory you can accomplish some forms of combined AND/OR by chaining saved searches, but that's a bit buggy currently.

jbarth3

Adam, wow, I hadn't even seen that before - I'm a little embarrassed - thanks for informing me about that

DannyD

I am using Zotero Standalone version, and I do not see any way to do Boolean searches in the Advanced Search dialog box. I can only enter one criterion for the search. Can someone explain how I can do Boolean searches there? Thanks.

adamsmith

you can add lines to the search by using the plus sign to the right. Strictly speaking you cannot do full boolean searches, since you can't combine AND and OR - to do that you would need to use a saved search as an intermediate step.

DannyD

Thanks for this feedback. However, I do not see a plus sign anywhere. Using Zotero Standalone, I choose Edit, then Advanced Search. In the dialog box that appears, there is a place to choose the field upon which I want to search and then choose "is, is not, contains, does not contain". Below that are check boxes for "search sub folders" and "show only top-level items". However, I do not see any plus sign, which would allow me to add more than one criterion.

adamsmith

It should be to the right of the search field. (A plus and a minus). If it's not, try re-sizing the window.

DannyD

Thanks, again, for your continued help. I discovered something strange. Even after re-sizing the dialog box window as much as I could, I still didn't see the plus sign. However, I moved my cursor so that it hovered over the grey area to the right of the 'input box', and that caused a nondescript small grey box to appear. (Note: Before hovering my cursor in that area, the area is completely grey and smooth and appears to have no buttons, icons, etc.. The box that appears does not have a plus sign in it. The box is simple and plain.) When, I click on this 'box', then a second line is added for entering additional criteria for the search. So, essentially I've discovered that the feature is present. However, something in the UI is causing the box with the plus sign to only appear when I hover in that area.

adamsmith

I feel like this issue has been mentioned before.
Maybe Simon or Dan have more on troubleshooting this. What system (OS) are you on?

DannyD

I am running Windows 7 64-bit.

I don't feel a need to solve this issue for me personally. Now I know how to use the feature, even though the UI isn't perfect.

I'm just grateful for you all who have created this amazing program. It gets the essential job done well, and I would be lost without it.

dstillman

What Zotero version are you using? This was fixed in 3.0b3.

DannyD

That clarifies the issue. I am using 3.0b2.1 I did not realize there was a newer version.

I just checked out the Zotero download page, and I see that 3.0rc1.1 is now available. I will go and download that right away!