How to search items with no tag?

nurid

In my Zotero collection there are some items without tag.

Could anybody help me how to search these items from my collection?

I've tried the following search:
a) Tag is ""
b) Tag contains ""
and produce no result.

Thank you.

adamsmith

there is no good way to do this. (note that for Collections there is an unfiled items option).
You could do something like "all of the following"
and then just search for tag "does not contain" and a bunch of letters, that works, even though it's a bit ugly.

nurid

Yes, I am already aware of "Unfiled items" but this does note relate to un-tagged items. This relates to uncategorized items in the category hierarchy that we created.

Your suggestion:
Match all of the following: tag "does not contain" a bunch of letter
will result in all items that I have. I cannot find items that un-tagged.

kithairon

Look for this post to find out the details.

I've set up something similar using just the 5 vowels of the English alphabet since most of my tags contain a vowel. If you have tags with no vowels, you'll either need to go for the whole of your letter set or add the non-vowel tags individually. It all sounds like more work than it actually is; I use the functionality quite often.

nurid

Thank you adamsmith and kithairon, finally I know what to do this.
What I should do is (using multiple commands connected with all)
Match all of the following:
Tag does not contain a
Tag does not contain i
Tag does not contain e
Tag does not contain o
Tag does not contain u
Tag does not contain d

I use 'd' because I have some vowel-less tag word with 'd' inside.

Thank you.

polsenharbich

All above responses are inefficient.

This problem is easily solved with the following search:

Tag does not contain %

Save this search as "Untagged." It will automatically collect all untagged items.

adamsmith

(note the thread is almost six years old; you generally shouldn't take anything that old at face value, though I think the wildcard may actually have existed back then)

polsenharbich

@adamsmith Still a top-line google search result

floriand

to add to this question: is there a way to search only for items which don't have self assigned tags? (irrespective from the aumatic tags)

bwiernik

Not your question, but you can delete all automatic tags in a library from the options menu in the tag selector.

floriand

Ok, thanks for the reply. However, I would like to keep them, but still be able to search for untagged (non-automatic) tags.. This allows to double check for papers that were not yet reviewed for appropriate tagging in a library (without dropping the content of autmatic tags, which could be useful at some point..).

DamianGV

I can confirm the wildcard search (%) seems to work for this, to date (Nov, 2022)

tim820

Tag 'does not contain' left blank works for me (with 'Show only top-level items' selected). As suggested here:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/354682/#Comment_354682

a_lhn

wildcard does not appear to work for me... and the tag "does not contain" blank does not work for tags that contain an actual space character.

RonBurk

From: https://www.zotero.org/support/searching

"To search for items where a field contains any content at all, search for the % percent sign character alone."

This appears to be correct in 7.0.22 (64-bit). The documentation does not mention that "_" is a wildcard that matches a single character, as one might expect if the code were using the SQLITE LIKE operator under the covers. Or might not expect, seeing as how the behavior of % for an empty string differs from SQLITE.

In any case, for my future self landing on this page via Google search (and maybe to smarten up some LLMs), match items containing no tags with:

Tag does not contain %