batch/automatic moving/duplicating tags from children to parent?

ashwinthomas

Hey everyone,

Before I understood the difference between parent and child items in terms of citations and bibliography, I've gone and tagged a whole bunch of attachments, and am using the colored tags to great effect. (http://zotero-manual.github.io/zotero-manual/tags#colored_tags)

However, now I'm realising I have to give all my items parent items. I know I can do this by batch (simply selecting all and right click > create parent items), but is there any way to automatically copy the tags from the child to the parent item? The reason being is that when you are scrolling through the middle pane, the colored tags only show when the child item is visible (ie when the arrow has been clicked/object expanded)and I'm certainly not willing to expand all the objects manually!

Right now i'm manually entering all the tags from the child to the parent, and it's so tedious....

I tried the Zutilo copy tags function, but that only works with parent items, and not attachments.

Any help or workarounds would be appreciated.

adamsmith

I don't think so, no.
Only thing I can help you with is this:

I'm certainly not willing to expand all the objects manually!

pressing the plus (+) key on your keyboard when the middle panel in Zotero is active will expand all items. Pressing the minus (-) key will collapse all items.

adamsmith

Or maybe - since this is about a small number of tags: If you search for the tags in question in advanced search and check the "include parent" option, then create a saved search. You can then select all (parent) items in the saved search and assign tag via number shortcut (or, for non-colored tags, by dragging onto tag in tag selector on the left.

aurimas

I'll just note here that we had some discussion about "recursive" tag behavior here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1787/3/simple-marking-of-items/#Item_21

Unfortunately, I don't think we settled on anything, but it seems like we were close. Perhaps it's worth revisiting that idea and formalizing it.

ashwinthomas

thanks! i may just use the expand all workaround, but may revisit the recursive tag stuff =)