Word plugin and Groups: make it still more difficult to cite from the wrong libraries

mark

Despite the nice display which shows where items originate, it still can easily happen that in a collaborative document two out of six citations of a source go to a personal instead of a group library (we have this all the time). This indicates that a more rigorous option may be needed to "lock" libraries to documents, and to discourage citing from the wrong libraries.

Proposal 1: Make it possible to "pin" one or more libraries. In the dropdown which shows the originating libraries of items, provide a simple "pin" button. If clicked, this means that items from that library will always get precedence (i.e. are displayed below items cited if any, above items from other libraries).

Proposal 2: If there are pinned libraries, provide a warning when citing from a non-pinned library. Actually it would be even better if it gave the option to copy the item to the pinned library:

Warning: this item does not exist in your pinned library.
Do you want to copy it there?
[button: Copy to pinned library and cite]
[button: Cite version from non-pinned library]

mronkko

I second this request.

Here are a couple of related threads

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/23292/replacing-citations-with-a-copy-from-different-library/

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/19350/option-to-disable-libraries/

I have written two different patches with different approaches to solve this problem. The first was to disable libraries (like pinning), and the second was to use a preferred library that will always be used if a copy of an item exist in that library. However, neither of these patches is currently included in the Zotero code.


There are some discussions in the Zotero developers mailing list

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topicsearchin/zotero-dev/"preferred$2420library"/zotero-dev/UtQBZMtylWA

And there is a ticket for this

https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/1897


But it is unclear if this will be implemented, or when that could be available.

mronkko

Here is one more discussion that is relevant

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zotero-dev/7ITP6mDuSBw

Simon

I had intended to sort libraries in the QuickFormat dialog by the number of items from that library cited in the document, but I took a look and realized that this wasn't working as expected. This should be fixed for Zotero 3.0.8. It seems like this would serve the same purpose as proposal 1?

mronkko

I would think that It solves proposal 1 mostly.

What would still remains as a problem is merging two documents that have been written using different libraries. I am suggesting a solution for this problem here

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/23292/replacing-citations-with-a-copy-from-different-library/

These two changes would probably solve most use cases where duplicates of the same reference from different libraries are included in a document.

mark

It solves proposal 1 mostly but not fully. I had already seen that usually the ordering of libraries goes alright, but it remains fairly easy to cite from non-preferred libraries. That why I thought some kind of warning would be good.

I fully support Mronkko's proposal for an easier way to replace citations (and especially bulk replacing citations).