Notetaking in Zotero

damart06

Hi,

I’ve been using Zotero for months as a reference manager to keep the bibliographical information, meanwhile I’ve taken notes from the sources in paper with note cards. I’ve noticed that Zotero provides a manner to take notes of every item, but I think that it doesn’t have the advantages of organization that the traditional way of index cards has. So, do you know how to use the tools of Zotero to take separate notes that refer to their sources at the same time? Or using another software is more appropriate to this task?

Thanks for any information.

adamsmith

Everyone uses notes differently. Zotero isn't super powerful in terms of how it lets you arrange and organize notes, so if that's something you're after, you'll likely have to rely on other software for that.

On the other hand, Zotero offers both standalone notes and notes attached to sources, has the "Related" function to cross-link items and allows for tagging not just of parent items but also of notes individually. You'll have to decide whether that works for you or not.

kmhilliard

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adamsmith

items will always show with their parents & siblings in search, but you'll note that only the item that all items that are not in the search results are greyed out. So you'll still need to scroll through your notes to find it/them, but it'll be relatively fast.

An alternative, that I'd think might work better for you is to make those note Standalone notes and use the "Related" function to link them to the entry for the narrative. That way they'd show up by themselves in a search/tag filter.

(edit: yeah, please don't delete posts, even when you have an answer. Just make a note that you've figured out something. My answer now makes very little sense for anyone coming along)