Creating bibliographies and reports from My Library

Rintze

Is there a reason why it isn't possible to create bibliographies and reports directly by right-clicking My Library, like with collections?

adamsmith

I think that makes sense. Since creating a bibliography or a report with e.g. 5000+ items will freeze - if not crash - Firefox, I think that option shouldn't be too "tempting" - users may think that you still get to select which items will be in the report or so.
And if you do actually want a report/bibliography for the whole library that's two clicks more.

Rintze

Fine with me (I don't use reports :P). It's just that the documentation for reports (which hadn't been touched since 2009) used to say "a student can create a full report of their Zotero Library" which might create expectations that this would be possible (I removed the sentence).

Obviously not every user is going to be as productive as to have 5000+ items, though. Conversely, there might be users with over 5000 items in a single collection.

dmcfee

On this note...I have a big library (11,000 items).

How can I "see" the whole thing at once. Even with tags, I've forgotten whole parts of the library.

dstillman

dmcfee: What do you mean by "see"? Zotero is a database—it gives you various ways to sort and organize the data. Generating a report or bibliography for 11,000 items would freeze Firefox/Standalone for a very long time and/or cause them them to crash. (If you really want to try, put all your items in a collection and generate a report or bibliography, but you might want to make other plans for the day.)

dmcfee

Dan,
Thanks much for your reply. I get it now...thanks! I was stuck in the My Library on the web and not looking the plugin for Firefox.

thanks!
Daniel