Related items: types of relations?

galicarnax

Looking through Zotero API documentation I found that API supports different types of relations between related items (e.g., owl:sameAs, dc:replaces,...). Yet, I've never seen any possibility in the user interface of Zotero Desktop to indicate the type of relations - you just relate the items and that's all (and user documentation also does not mention how to set different relation types). Is is just that APIs have reserved this possibility for future releases, or have I missed something?

bwiernik

Different types of relations have been planned in general for some time, but no ETA on when they might be implemented or exactly what form they will take. Currently, Zotero has two types of relations: "related" (what you can creat with the Related Items function) and "sameAs", which is created when you merge two items.

hernandez-cerdan

It would be great (and easy to implement) to get second neighbor relationships.
Item A is related to 1, 2, and 3.
If you click 1 you only see it is related to A, but it would be handy to see is also related to 2 and 3 through A.

Max3M

This sounds like duplication of functions. Why don't you use collections or tags for that? Both tags and collections are designed exactly for grouping of items. Item relations are meant to be pair-wise.

hernandez-cerdan

There are non-linear relationships between items. And a single label (a tag, or a collection) sometimes is not enough to capture these.
It can be solved by adding a lot of tags, sure, but it is much more work for the user to categorize items in such detail.
Also, the problem of tags/collections is that do not scale well, when you have too many, it becomes harder to navigate. I prefer broad collections, more specific tags, and then, fine detail connections using Related, but why limiting it to first neighbors?

My suggestion on adding the second neighbor pair-wise relationship would be able to capture complex relationships almost for free for the user.

The user only worries about pair-wise relationships as it is now. But then, clicking in the Related tab, the first neighbors are shown (as it is now) and below (there is plenty of free space) the second neighbors are shown.

iagogv

It would be nice that Related items could be marked with a relation type in order to distinguish, for example, items related because they connect different versions of a work of items related because one cites the other.

The last example also shows that it would be useful allow a non-symmetry of the items, so even "when you relate item A to B, B will be automatically related to A", the relation would not be necessarily the same so it could be that "A cites B" and "B is cited by A" or "A is the original publication of a paper" while "B is the publication of the paper in the Selected papers of an author", etc.

iagogv

I've just seen that it was suggested some time ago by @emilianoeheyns in https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/332439/#Comment_332439 and later in the same discussion by @lupuli (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/332649/#Comment_332649
I really believe it would be an important feature).

Another place where @emilianoeheyns had already suggested this is https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/306636/#Comment_306636, after @LiborA (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/275135/#Comment_275135).

Let's keep here possible relations and places where it is asked for this feature.
* cites/cited by
* 1st ed/nth ed
* original version of a paper/publication in another context (as above, selected papers of an author, or journal article after a report, or translation, ...)
* book/chapter
* presentation/journal article or software or whatever being the matter of the presentation
* paper/erratum-correction paper
* preprint/posterior journal publication

iagogv

I was thinking one way of allow different kinds of relations, would be, on one hand by implementing for directional relations, while on the other hand by allow to tagging relations.

Ben_L

This feature could be one of the most significant to be implemented into Zotero so far, because it suddenly opens up for viewing how all your science papers and books are connected to each other; both from direct references but also from topics, concepts, methods and what have you. Not by simple tags or labels, but phyletically (so to speak). These relations can then be seen graphically which helps to visually trace the development and progress of the ideas and concepts one is working on, even back to the primary sources where that particular concept was originally conceived. It should be possible for the program to make many of these relations automatically, either from metadata or from scanning each file and looking for matching references/links. It can even be programmed so one can approve or discard each of the relation-findings as it goes along. I am not a programmer, but would be more than happy to work with someone who wanted to take up the challenge of developing this feature. I don't know if that particular feature exists outside of Zotero already in another system or there is a plug-in that I've overlooked. If anyone knows, please leave a comment.

tim820

Cites/cited-by relationships are actually handled quite well by the Reference plugin.
https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference *
It extracts that information automatically when requested by the user - from each PDF and from online metadata repositories (ie it does not rely on the user manually adding relationships, as Related does).

The current Zotero Relations tab *does* need to add the ability to define the nature of different relationships more specifically, as suggested above. Lumping all different sorts of relations under the same heading is imprecise and inefficient. Of course currently the user gets to choose what number and type of Relations they add for their items, but without any way to signify the type of relation they just added.

Cites/cited-by relations are probably the most common and important relationships. Taking those *out* of the Related tab scheme altogether - as the Reference plugin effectively does - leaves Related only for other relationships. That seems to me to be the best approach moving forward. Hopefully Zotero will add its own support for automated cites/cited-by relationships in the future, such is their importance (ie it shouldn't be left to a plugin).

* the Reference plugin documentation is in Chinese but easily translated, for example with Chrome's Translate to English (or any other language). And that documentation has not currently been fully updated for the plugin under Zotero 7, where some things changed. But you learn how it works mostly by using it. It's very powerful.

BTW the Ethereal Style plugin allows you to *visualize* Zotero Related links ...
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/121692/ethereal-plugin-graph-view