Display 'short titles" in "my library"

tiporzer

Hello everybody,

our department recently started working with Zotero. In our case the 'short title' of books is very important. Now we realized that you can't sort your items after the short title and it's not even shown it the main list of the library.

The question now is: Is there a chance to add the short title to the columns which are shown in "my library".

Thanks for any help

adamsmith

@dstillman - what do you think? I guess the argument against would be that short titles are commonly just the beginning of the full title, but where they are different, I can see why sorting&displaying would be nice

less

Would very much like this. Am now copying "short title" to "extra" so that I can view and sort on it, would like to be able to use "extra" for..extra stuff.

bwiernik

Especially for legal cases this would be helpful.

tiporzer

Is there a chance they will add this feature within the next time or is there someone to reach out to for that request?

dstillman

The main complication here is that Title, in the current implementation, is a special column that includes the twisty and can't be toggle off. So while we could easily add Short Title as an option, if we did that Title would still need to appear as well.

The other option would be to add a checkbox in the column picker that lets you use Short Title instead of Title for the main field.

adamsmith

I think just adding shortTitle as a quick solution seems right. The checkbox seems overkill for the relatively small number of users who will need this -- they can just resize the title column really narrow.

bwiernik

I think for the cases described in this thread, keeping the title and short title both visible would be fine.

A cover-all-use-cases options would be to do both options you describe (with the checkbox being disabled if Short Title is selected separately). Alternatively, there could be three options in a section at the top of the column picker—title, short title, both.

dstillman

OK, we'll add this column. The items tree is currently being rebuilt from scratch, so it'll need to wait until after that — probably a couple months. Issue created.

tiporzer

Thank you very much for all the contribution and the addition of the new column is great news for us.

LynLin

@dstillman Hello. Is this function being developed now? I really look forward to this function. Sometimes paper titles are too long to remember. So I will give a short title to the paper to help me mark papers and recall contents. And some people also have the same habit to rename a short title to paper.
Thank you for your contribution.

dstillman

A Short Title column is available now in the latest Zotero 6 beta.

less

THANK YOU SO MUCH! This is terrific news, much appreciated

dclarke

Can I disable the way Zotero uses "Short Title"? I like to have a short code for my own purposes that I use to refer to references (e.g., Smith 2021) when I'm writing. But of course I then need to find what item I was referring to. I could write "Smith 2021" in the "Extras" field, and that would be fine. But I want to import a huge library from Endnote (which I've been using until now) and in that library, I used a field called "Short Title" precisely to input this short code for each reference. When I import a reference, what's in "Short Title" in Endnote not surprisingly automatically gets understood by Zotero as belonging in Zotero's "Short Title" field, even though the field serves a different function. What I've written in Endnote's "Short Title" field is just a personal, unique code for each reference, and not necessarily what one would want for a subsequent citation, which is what Zotero uses "Short Title" for. Therefore, I'd like to be able to tell Zotero to just basically pretend that the "Short Title" field has no useful information, and not to look there when it's trying to figure out how to do subsequent citations.

Daniel Werning

I would like to be able to display the column "short title" also in the table of the public web libraries.