Can't select multiple tags

gkerr

It seems to me that it used to be easy to select multiple tages... I can't figure out how to do it any more. Is this a problem with Zotero 4?

adamsmith

Zotero still lets you select mutiple tags, but you cannot select an additional tag if adding that tag to the filter would mean that no items are returned.

gkerr

Ahhh... right. Thanks. And how would I select multiple tags so that I could export all the references with tags that I wanted to include?

adamsmith

If I understand you correctly could do an advanced search set to "any" -
If you have, say, three tags - "apple" "tree" "pie" - a search
match "any"
tag is apple
tag is tree
tag is pie
would return all items that have at least one of those tags.
You can then create a saved search and export those items.

gkerr

Thanks very much - I'll do that.

19nurso79

Hi,
I was just looking for a solution to the quite similar problem. Thanks for already having an answer!

However, I think it would be comfortable for a lot of users, if this type of search could be integrated in the “tag”-selection itself. Let’s say via a way to distinguish, if the click on a tag returns ‘just those’ items containing this tag OR if it only ‘highlights’ them until a second (or more) tag is chosen to exclude the unchosen.
With this the “any” command talked about before or search strings as “AND” or “OR” would be integrated in the tag-selection.

19nurso79

Most likely this could be done either by defining a keyboard short-cut or – more likely – a third state of clicking on a tag in the tags-area (not chosen; “AND chosen” [as is now]; and “OR chosen”).
I hope this can be done with zotero and I hope that this would not annoy other users used to the two states as is at the moment. Probably such feature should be selectable in the settings of zotero.
As I am not into programming I wouldn’t know if or how zotero could be modified to fit to my suggestion.

Regards

SiGi

Hi 19nurso79,

you are right. For a lot of users it would be very comfortable to have a better tag-selection pane with AND and OR functionality. This topic is discussed since a long time (see here ) and unfortenately until now it is not realised.

19nurso79

Hi SiGi,

thanks for the hint to the other thread. Now I know where else to out emphasis on this topic. And I was not thinking of the NOT option... A Button probably will do better than …4 clicks…

ray.cassani

I do agree with all of you, it would be very useful to have a easier way to select items that contains tags A or B. In fact the method proposed by adamsmith (second comment) works well, but it requieres many clicks and keyboard entries.

To clarify I've done this toy example:

I have 4 items with its respective tags

• Book with tag A. Tags: A
  
• Book with tags A, B. Tags: A, B
  
• Book with tag B. Tags: B
  
• Book with tag C. Tags: C
  

Looking for items with tag A or B:   Image
Looking for items with tag A and B:   Image
Looking for items with tag A but not B:  Image
The last one is equal to A and not(B)

Unfortunately, more complicated searchs such as [ (A or B) and not (C)] are not possible in one search, but they can be decomposed in smaller searchs

[ (A or B) and not (C)] = [A and not(C)] + [B and not(C)]
save the search results and merge them Link