Feature suggestions: folder links

suckale

Zotero already has the very convenient capability to place papers in multiple folders. It should also be possible to place folder links to create a better library.

Say, you have been sorting your references into a disease folder with subfolders cancer, diabetes,.. You also have a separate top level folder called microorganisms with subcategories of bacteria, yeast, and viruses. Now, you want to create a link to cancer-causing viruses in the cancer folder to point to the subfolder in microorganisms.

This, to my knowledge, is not currently possible but would be a very useful feature for all of the many references that can logically be placed in multiple folders.

bwiernik

I'm not exactly following what you are looking for, but I think you might be able to accomplish this using Saved Searches (you can specify Collection as a search condition).

https://www.zotero.org/support/searching#saved_searches

suckale

Hi bwiernik, thanks for the tip. Saved searches wouldn't work since not all papers in the folder can be found using the same search criteria.

Let me try to explain this better. If I were trying to order my PDFs on my computer, categories would invariably overlap. Viruses could be categorized under microbes. Or since some viruses cause cancer they could be filed under cancer. If on Win or macOS, you would solve this by creating a folder link, for example a link in the folder cancer to the subfolder cancer-causing viruses in the folder microbes.

Zotero can do links for references, even though they are not shown as links as on most OSs. You can place a reference in 2 different folders at the same time. But there is no way to do this for an entire folder and this would be very convenient. Hope that is clearer.

bwiernik

In Advanced/Saved Searches, you can specify "Collection" as a search criterion, so you could search, for example, for:

"Collection" "is" "Cancer"
"Collection" "is" "Mocrobe"

to find all of the items belonging to both collections (viruses that cause cancer).

You could similarly do this using tags, rather than collections.

Am I missing something about what you are looking for?

Gurdas_Sandhu

@suckale I would second what @bwiernik suggested about Tags. For many situations Tags are like Collections on steroids. And Tags work in AND mode, though I wish there was also a OR mode. Anyway, if all your items are tagged appropriately, and you select the tag "Cancer" you will only see articles that have that tag and you will only see tags associated with those selected articles. So, if none of your Cancer tagged articles has the tag "yeast", then the yeast tag will no longer be shown as selectable. But you will continue to see the "Virus" tag. Then, if you select the virus tag, you will only see articles with both cancer and virus. You can deselect the cancer tag and so on. This allows you to create virtual collections on the spot. I find it very convenient. If there is a tag combination you need to refer to often, just create a Saved search for that combination. The only limitation of saved searches for my needs has been that they cannot be nested. But may be that will come in the near future since it has been requested in the past. Would that be about right, @adamsmith?

adamsmith

I certainly won't promise any ETA. Devs have said they want to allow organizing saved searches, but there are lots of features out there, no idea where that's in the relative order of things.