Search on item type

morgain13

[Client + web] How do I Search on an item type e.g all Theses? all Journal Articles?

It's useful to have the icon display on the left of the item row, but clicking it doesn't do anything.
It could be done by manually making Tags for each item type but that would be a big job to go through adding them to each item - plus it adds too many Tags - and the data is already there in the system.

aurimas

In the client: http://www.zotero.org/support/searching#advanced_search

On the web, this is not currently possible

dstillman

On the web you can sort by item type, though, so the different types will at least be grouped together in the list.

adamsmith

(If you do use advanced search, make sure to search for _Item Type_ not for _Type_ which refers to the content of the Report/Thesis/Manuscript type field.)

morgain13

Thank you for the information.
It would be great (in the client) to click the icon left of listing, and get selected display on that Item Type.

adamsmith

sorry, not sure what you mean here - you mean clicking on the item type icon should work like a tag and filter for all items of that type? While that sounds kind of nice, it also seems like a major possible source of confusion that people may trigger accidentally.

morgain13

@adamsmith good point to consider.

But looking at the layout the icon is on the far left so not that easy to click by mistake. Users will generally click the item name quite bit further along the line if they want to open it.

Secondly, when this feature activates, as with activating a Tag search, the centre content visibly moves AND then will show all the same type of icon all down that far left column.

I think that is actually a better display of the nature of the search results than Tags gets. Often if a Tag is lower down the A-Z list of Tags it is below the bottom of the screen. It's easy to forget it's activated on returning to Zoetero client (phone call distraction etc) and then be puzzled why content is not as expected i.e. complete list.

Both features could benefit from an alert of some kind: an icon at the top SEARCH RESULTS hover/ or maybe a change to the search box - coloured outline?
But getting a list of all Item Type X doesn't seem to lend itself to mistakes as much as Tags do.

A luxury version could trigger a confirm box 'You are activating a search on all items of Type X. Do you wish to continue? Y/N'

QNNGroup

Does anyone know if this is still an issue for the web client? (i.e. can't search by item type) And thank you for the tips and help from 10 years in the future :)