Making different tags mean the same

beogl

Dear Zotero,

A lot of different tags are added when I import items. Some of them means just the same to me - which you can't know, but I want to tell you that so you can help me better. Is there a way to do that?

fbennett

If you rename tags to have the same name (in the tag selector in the left-hand column) the two tag sets will be merged.

beogl

Thanks fbennet, but that does not solve my problem. When I add new articles it will come back.

There are very many different tags in my libraries at the moment and tags looks totally useless unless I can make some of them aliases of each other.

adamsmith

not possible then, no.
Might be possible to approximate if some version of hierarchical tags ever get implemented, but afaik that's not on the near-term horizon.

beogl

Thanks adamsmith. It is a major problem that prevents searching. So it would be nice to hear that a solution gets nearer the horizon. ;-)

adamsmith

depending on how many tags we're talking about you may be able to work something with advanced searches.
Beyond that, I really wouldn't get my hopes up.
I don't think there's a big chance that significant changes to tags (beyond the color coding that is) are goig to happen this year.

dstillman

Someone could write a plugin to do this pretty easily, but no, this won't happen in Zotero itself anytime soon (if ever).

emirsale

Tag aliases is very useful feature that I expect. Different papers' authors make tags in their own way, with them not assembling to the entire knowledge system in the library. Tag parsing heuristics identify some amount of surrounding text as tags thus complicating the state a more. Manually resolving tags to make them cleaner is very boring and not far from totally de novo tagging each paper added.