"Reading queue"

octavabasso

I'd like to suggest a place to create a reading queue or to-do list. This would be similar to the 'related items' tag, but geared towards creating an orderly list of works to be reviewed. Since Zotero makes it so easy to collect items, sometimes I find that I forget what I've collected. And, while I read a source, if it cites something I want to read later, I can certainly get the citation into Zotero, but many times I forget to read that new item later. A 'reading queue' would be a place to collect items I intend to review - kind of like a playlist in iTunes.

dstillman

A 'reading queue' would be a place to collect items I intend to review - kind of like a playlist in iTunes.

Or like a collection in Zotero, which works exactly the same way as an iTunes playlist.

You could also use tags.

octavabasso

That's true. But I'd like something that doesn't return a result in alphabetical order, but in an arbitrary order of my choosing. Just a place to dump 5-10 sources that I want to tackle immediately after I work on the one I'm studying... a todo list.

octavabasso

this obviously could be done in a document (Word, OO, etc), but this feature in Z would be nice...

dstillman

You can sort by other fields, e.g. Date Added.

Arbitrary ordering is a separate feature request that's been discussed previously and may happen eventually.

mark

I use Tags and a saved search for this. Items I need to read get a "need to read" tag. The saved search retrieves these items and sorts them by Date Added (but resorting by author or year is easy).

wlx

I would like to suggest this feature too, so that I can use it as a 'study plan' for read books/papers.

rhend

I also was searching forums for hints of a feature like this. This kind of thing is central to my own workflow (although I can understand that it can seem sort of redundant with preexisting features, too...).

pguth

There is a nice FF plugin for that purpose: "Read it later" https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/7661

rhend

Ah, Read it Later is great! I use it for online things a lot. That's totally the kind of thing I was looking for.

Unfortunately, my real work is 98% pdf's (true for most people in science, I think), which, since I rely heavily on annotations, I don't read in a browser... so tagging the page in the browser, then following that back to the zotoro entry (which I don't know how to do automatically?), then clicking "show file", then opening it in acrobat, then remembering when I'm done to go back to the browser version (which has to be still open) to take it out of the queue isn't any faster than just keeping a typed up, hand maintained list in a document, really....

Thanks for the suggestion, though!

lzjk

Strongly suggest this too. And also suggest colorful tags so that I can mark the references with different colors, or let them show in different color backgrounds. And also I would like to see the notes column in the main area. Thanks to the developers. Zotero is quite helpful tome.

mark

Colourful tags (varying the background colour by tag) is quite a nice idea, and it should not be too difficult to implement, right?

Bionatsci

Tag colours, like those in thunderbird, have been mentioned before. There seems to be quite a lot of support for the idea and judging by the response of the dev team to similar suggestions my guess would be that it will probably be implemented at some point.

octavabasso

All - One thing that's helped me is something similar to Mark's suggestion: using saved searches. I forget which blog I saw this one, but if you set up a saved search for items added in the last 5 days (or whatever time frame), you can more easily create a collection of items that demand your immediate attention. Now, I happily add stuff while browsing and then go back to my "Recent Additions" folder to review what I found.

RuizSerra

12 years later this would still be a wonderful feature to have. I envision it as merely another column which could hold an integer value similar to the z-index in CSS, allowing the user to add items to the reading queue by simply adding an arbitrary value to the "read queue index" column.