Upgrade StorageSorting in Zotero main window - by first author only
Entries in "my library" (zotero main pane) are sorted by all author names if sorting by authors is activated. This is very confusing to me, as I usually don't remember all authors and their sequence. For my purposes, a much clearer overview of my literature would be sorting by first author (firstCreator) only, and by year within a first author.
In old versions of zotero, sorting was at least done by the string visible (i.e., all the Authorname et al. sorted by year), but this was changed and seems to be no longer available.
Is there a way to add an option to Preferences that causes to ignore coauthors for the sorting of zotero display? Alternatively, an option to restore the previous behavior (sorting by the actual string shown under "Creator") would be helpful.
In addition, I could imagine that multi-level sorting could also be useful - breaking ties in the current sorting column by the previously selected sorting, similar to e.g. table sorting in Wikipedia.
In old versions of zotero, sorting was at least done by the string visible (i.e., all the Authorname et al. sorted by year), but this was changed and seems to be no longer available.
Is there a way to add an option to Preferences that causes to ignore coauthors for the sorting of zotero display? Alternatively, an option to restore the previous behavior (sorting by the actual string shown under "Creator") would be helpful.
In addition, I could imagine that multi-level sorting could also be useful - breaking ties in the current sorting column by the previously selected sorting, similar to e.g. table sorting in Wikipedia.
I don't think we'll add a pref for first author searching, sorry, and the old behavior was changed on purpose because it was confusing and ignored authors' first names, so that's not coming back.
I fully understand it is difficult to design a tool that is useful for all different fields.
However, I can hardly imagine I am the only person missing the old behavior (library sorting by the actual string shown as Creator, i.e. ignoring first names, and coauthors when there are more than 2). I can imagine that sorting by all full author names is less confusing for some people - but it makes the sorting way more confusing for me (and others I asked about this).
In the end, these strings are how papers are quoted, recognized and referenced in the many papers with author-year citation styles.
So, if there is any way to choose the old sorting behavior as a preference, it would be much appreciated.
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8057/2/#Item_15