enhancement request: Search on First Author

james.k.russell

My database has many entries from many prolific, highly collaborative authors, leaders in my field. Their names appear in many long lists of authors. I would like then option, when I search on their name, to be shown only the items for which they are first author, not where they are an additional contributor. If I use an advanced search for "Eck, I'd like to see articles only where Eck is the surname of the first author (maybe 10 entries to scan) and not those where the are 2nd, 5th or 10th (maybe 100 entries to scan).

PierrOcean

I second this! In most cases I search by 1rst author as it is usually the only author (sadly) that we remember from a citation.
Any programmer in JavaScript who could do a quick plugin for us? :D

My quick work around is to search the author and then sort by author to find those author lists that start by the author I am interested in.

qqbb

If you install the BBT add-on, you'll get a citation key column. Use a format such as Author2021 for your citekeys. Then sort by the citation key column.

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/83188/sort-by-first-creator-year-for-the-middle-panel

qqbb

Zotero's items tree has a find-as-you-type function. Sort the items list by the citation key column and put the focus on an item in the list. You can then type the first letters of an author's name to find citekeys that start with, e.g., "Aut..".

dstillman

You can also just use find-as-you-type with the built-in Creator column.

iagogv

@dstillman it would be great if the typing was visible, maybe through search fields under the column names