Feature Request: Automatically Break Extracted Annotations into Separate Notes

jessicarsherrill

Hello,

I love the new "extract annotations" feature in Zotero, as it makes my note-taking process much more seamless. I have been transitioning to creating metatagged quotation notes in Zotero, vs. my old process of manually categorizing quotations under major themes in Word. It looks like the "generate report" feature will allow me to produce more dynamic lists of quotes (as sometimes I want to see all of my information on a single sheet.)

However, it is very time-consuming to manually copy and paste every quote from the extracted annotations into its own note so that it can be appropriately metatagged (otherwise irrelevant quotes from the same text would show up in the report). In the future, would you please consider adding a feature that allows the extracted quotes to be broken into multiple notes (1 per quote) after they are extracted?

Thanks for everything you do! (And please let me know if I'm missing something - I'm still learning the new features since the native PDF reader update.)

dstillman

Note that you can add tags to individual annotations in the built-in PDF reader. We don't currently do anything with those once the annotations are added to notes, but you can use a custom note template to include them in the note text. That might do what you're looking for?

You can also filter by tag in the annotations sidebar, select all annotations, and add just the annotations with that tag to a note.

jessicarsherrill

Hi, sorry about the late response, I have been on medical leave.

I'm not sure that would help with what I'm trying to do, as ideally I would still like each quote to be independent and dynamic from the others tagged with the same annotation tag. Then, for example, if necessary I could re-tag quote #1 with "X" annotation tag instead of "Y," and then it would no longer be associated with any of the "Y" annotations. This seems useful for more descriptive tagging, where the nature of the subject tag may change as one's argument develops and shifts. This process would allow one to recategorize quotes very easily and then search within the entire Zotero corpus for them.

With the solution stated above, if I'm understanding your suggestion correctly, I'd still have to copy and paste quotes with the same tag into a note, which would then need to be manually updated.

At base, I think I'm looking for a solution similar to another feature requested by other users - the ability to search between PDFs by specific annotation tags, and then to have the ability to generate a report by annotation tag. For this kind of thing, I'd like the ability to distinguish between annotation tags and item tags (perhaps with some quick way to cross-tag, but with control over which tags to crossover). Perhaps my first suggestions of being able to extract all the highlighted quotes into separate notes isn't the best way of getting to that endpoint; I'm not sure.

I saw on another post that something like this may be planned, which would be great!