Wishlist for Features

devash

After using Zotero for quite some time I finally collected all the feature wishes I came across during using this great tool.

Those wishes I found here http://www.zotero.org/support/requested_features or in the forum I just linked to. If I can cast a vote for those features please advise how to do so...

So here is my wish list:

• Editing
  • batch editing
    http://www.zotero.org/support/requested_features.
    

• Linking / Related
  • Semantic Relations:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1317/semantic-relations/
    
• Tagging
  • Multilingual tags.
    I’m am often tagging entries in German and others in English. Searching for a tag only yields results in one language, obviously. So by defining translations for tags I could search my library better.
    • Maybe this
      belongs more to the multilingual Zotero (http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/zotero-multilingual-overview.html)?
      
    • This could also be related to
      https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/28077/making-different-tags-mean-the-same/
      
  • Tags should have descriptions. This would be useful for abbreviations. So when you hover over a tag the tooltip could show the description
    
  • Allow me to change the tag type from a user-added tag to an automatically added tag (for tags which are not added automatically when adding an entry from a web source). Maybe tag categories could work as well (or something like tagglytagging as known from TiddlyWiki).
    
• Navigation
  • Provide an author (and an institution) View. Obviously this would need authors to be first class entities (and instituions probably as well). Thus one could see what author published what (and which institution what,
    resp.).
    
  • Let me navigate/filter by clicking on an author and selecting „more
    from this author“ / „more from this institution“. This could be work together with the previous position.
    
  • If I right-click on a tag of an entry let me select that tag as filter instead of letting me search through the tab window
    
• Export
  • Better BibTex support
    • see, for example,
      https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/17847/improving-bibtex-export/,
      https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/28663/bibtex-export-in-zotero-40-please-help/,
      and https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1033/retain-bibtex-key
      

adamsmith

There's no voting - as Dan says, development is not a democracy, if devs think something is a good idea and they have the resources they implement it. If someone wants to submit a patch for a feature, they can check with core devs on zotero-dev if and how it's going to be implemented and then submit it (that was the case for relative paths and multi-identifier and tag entry in the 4.0 release, for example).

Among the things you mention, batch editing is tentatively scheduled for 4.2 (though no guarantees) and very much on the menu in general.
Bibtex export is improving continuously, but the biggest issue are citekeys, which we should be able to solve as soon as we get an identifier field (which is going to be in 4.2 almost certainly).

I think broadly speaking all other features are things that devs agree are desirable, though precise implementation may vary - better author management (including eventually ORCID support), advanced tagging features (including hierarchical tags which could be used for tag equivalence as well), and hierarchical/semantic item types are on the general wish list, but we're likely talking years as a time horizon (that is, again, unless someone not at Zotero does it).