"keywords" field and MESH field

patrickgwelch · May 29, 2009

It appears that there are not special metadata fields for Author supplied "keywords" and/or MESH data in the 'Journal Article' reference type. I know that there is a 'tags' function in Zotero that could be used for storing keywords and MESH tags. However, I would like to make a feature request for Keywords and/or MESH tag fields to be added to the main 'info' metadata page/pane. The reason for this is that keywords/MESH tags are part of the original published manuscript (i.e., academic journals) and should be maintained independent of reader generated tags.

I believe that both the Author supplied keywords and Reader generated tags are valuable pieces of information/metadata but that they are different and should be kept separate.

(I can't think of a great use for this yet, but someone else might. Perhaps comparing and contrasting aggregated author keywords with reader generated tags??)

Thanks for your great software, keep up the great work :D

Pat

noksagt · May 29, 2009

The reason for this is that keywords/MESH tags are part of the original published manuscript (i.e., academic journals) and should be maintained independent of reader generated tags.

The interface does differentiate between automatically-culled tags & user-applied tags.

I can't think of a great use for this yet

Given this, the current scheme might be "good enough." Do you have specific suggestions on improving how the different types of tags are differentiated?

patrickgwelch · May 30, 2009

Thanks for your reply noksagt, if the interface does differentiate between automatically-culled tags (i.e., author/manuscript tags) and user-applied tags then that is all that is needed.

Though, I do have a stupid question (because it is probably pretty obvious - to others at least), but how do I manually add author/manuscript tags and have them indicated as such? I have been manually entering in references and so there has not been any automagic extraction of metadata from my PDFs?

Thanks again,

Pat

noksagt · May 30, 2009

how do I manually add author/manuscript tags and have them indicated as such?

At the moment, you don't (well, you could generate your own BibTeX/RIS/etc. (either in a text editor or by adding only author keywords & exporting) and then import it, but that might be somewhat tedious).

I have been manually entering in references and so there has not been any automagic extraction of metadata from my PDFs?

Any reason you're entering them manually? Just because you have a lot of PDFs already? (FWIW: I don't think PDF metadata services have keyword support anyway (google scholar/crossref), but you could certainly get keywords from other databases or from the publisher).

patrickgwelch · May 31, 2009

Hi Noksagt, thanks again for your response.

Since their is no existing (non tedious) way to manually enter author/manuscript 'keywords' into the metadata then I would like to make a non-urgent feature request to add such a feature (e.g., like the keyword metadata field offered by Mendeley). Again, it is not urgent but it would be handy to have, if only to have default metadata fields for the full range of academic article information and to maintain metadata-feature parity with compatible reference managers and to not lose metadata when transferring libraries back and forth (ideally there will be standards one day to optimize interoperability).

As for the reason I'm entering my references manually,

1) I'm doing a careful organization and double check of my references for my thesis research at this point

and 2) I stupidly don't yet know how to automate this process in Zotero (I will feel pretty silly if there is an easy and obvious way to automate this - but, please feel free to make me feel silly by telling me how to do this :P)

Thanks again for your help,

Pat