Export tags as a set?

nccomfort

Hi,
I'm working to develop a reasonably stable (though evolvable) set of tags for a collection. The collection is already several hundred items and will grow by 1-2+ orders of magnitude.

I'd like to be able to export a list of all tags in use in the collection at a given time: In practice, all the tags that show in the tag pane when I select the topmost level in the collection. If I had that as exportable text, then I'd be able to sift through and sort them, decide which to keep, which to merge, which to add, etc. The goal is to move toward a core set of tags that I can use, give to research assistants, etc., with a bunch of more specific or idiosyncratic tags that will be more volatile.

I'm not using a grounded approach, although I am somewhat familiar with grounded theory. The point being, I don't want to port the whole thing to NVivo. Just a textual list that I can eyeball would be awesome.

Thanks for any suggestions.
--Nathaniel

adamsmith

There's nothing built in, but you can export to CSV, Open in Excel, split the tag column, and then use the UNIQUE function -- shouldn't take more than 5mins

nccomfort

Ah, I see. By various search/replaces, I got as far as a single-column list of the tags in my reference set. The UNIQUE() function is only available in online or subscription versions of Excel, the bastards. But I think I'll be able to work with this.

The principle is clear—and kind of obvious in retrospect. Many thanks for taking the time to answer.

qqbb

The Zutilo add-on provides a "Copy tags" function which copies all tags of the selected items to the clipboard.

You could also try to create an export translator based on the relevant Zutilo code, see here. (In the translator, try using var tempTags = item.tags;)

nccomfort

Wow, thanks, I didn't know about Zutilo. That's super-helpful.
You folks rock. Zotero rules.