Papercuts

mronkko
Prior to fall 2009 release, Ubuntu had a project to fix papercuts in the software. These papercuts are small usability issues that can be fixed in a day or less. See more info at

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut

Zotero could use the same approach to fixing some of the usability issues for the 3.0 release. I have started a list of potential paper cuts below with links to forum discussions about each of these if available.

Please feel free to contribute to the list or discuss the different papercuts below. When you report a papercut, please link to relevant forum threads. If there are no threads about the issue, please start one. This will help to keep this tread clean.

Papercuts are tracked at github.








Initial list of papercuts

1) Restore from trash using context menu

2) Show a warning on Zotero site when clicking on an invitation link that is meant for other user account that the one that a user is currently logged in.

3) Grey out toolbar buttons to add items when a read only library is selected.

4) Separator between my library and group libraries should not be selectable

5) Warn about missing PDF tools when attempting to retrieve metadata in download dialog

6) Allow resetting the default action for downloaded PDFs from Zotero preferences

7) When clicking on the "New group..." button, the user should be automatically logged in to Zotero site with the currently configured user account.

8) There should be an option to disable name disambiquation and this should probably be enabled by default

9) The "Documentation and support" menu item under the gear-button should be a separate toolbar button to make it more easy to find for a new user

10) The lookup-button in the main toolbar should be moved to the item details pane to make it more clear that it is associated with a particular item. (Make the position the same as the "Restore to Library" button that is shown when viewing Trash)

11) Word processor plugin could include a help button or menu item that would direct to Zotero documentation

12) Zotero should first ask to choose all replacements to missing references before attempting to refresh the citations.

13) The dialog for choosing replacements for missing references should show the same columns as the insert citation dialog. And these should be selectable

14) When copy pasting multiple lines of text to author name text box, each line should create a new author

15) Search should not reset when switching between pane and tab modes

16) The user should be able to change search mode in the select items dialog

17) Selected sources pane should show more fields

18) The pop-up for editing citation details (prefix, suffix, etx) in the new QuickFormat citation picker should show item metadata.
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  • fbennett
    edited September 20, 2011
    I would be against this. It has been requested exactly once as far as I can tell, and support requests on disambiguation are not that common anymore.

    (Edit: noting for posterity that 8 was resolved by corrections to disambiguation logic, thanks to the fact that @mronkko raised the issue here.)
  • mronkko
    edited September 9, 2011
    8) There should be an option to disable name disambiquation and this should probably be enabled by default

    I would be against this. It has been requested exactly once as far as I can tell, and support requests on disambiguation are not that common anymore.
    In my experience, this is the most common problem that new users have. Also, I in my discipline (management & information systems) or my wife's discipline (psychology), I have not seen a single published article where the name disambiguation was used. So at least in my experience, defaulting to disabling name disambiguation would not cause any problems, but it would solve problems for new users.
  • fbennett
    Styles do state it as a requirement, though, not as an optional extra that can be dispensed with if it is inconvenient.
  • mronkko
    I am not saying that disambiguation should not be used at all. What I am saying that for most users that I know, disabling this by default would make sense because it would reduce confusion and not cause any problems. Many of the people that I have work with have never heard about name disambiguation before using Zotero.

    One option to solve the disambiguation issue would be to make it a document level preference that is shown to the user at the same screen where a citation style is selected for a document. This way the users would be made aware of this feature and allowed to disabled it if they do not see the need for it.
  • RintzeRintze
    In my discipline (management & information systems) or my wife's discipline (psychology), I have not seen a single published article where the name disambiguation was used.
    If you provide any evidence that a style doesn't use name disambiguation, we'll be more than happy to change the corresponding CSL style.
  • adamsmith
    I think the papercuts (or for Zotero - "index card cuts?") is a good idea.

    On disambiguation, I agree with Rintze and Frank, but along the lines of what Rintze says, I think the papercut fix here would be to do a better job of incorporating the more advanced csl 1.0 disambiguation in existing styles. I also wonder if we shouldn't think about setting the default behavior of givenname-disambiguation-rule to "by-cite" or, alternatively (so we don't have to change the schema) include that option in all styles where we don't really know. I think that mronkko is right that the all names disambiguation as set in csl default is pretty rare.
  • mronkko
    edited September 9, 2011
    If you provide any evidence that a style doesn't use name disambiguation, we'll be more than happy to change the corresponding CSL style.
    The problem is that even if journals require a particular style that says that name disambiguation should be used, some (in my experience many) journals do not use disambiguation.

    One such example is Structural Equation Modeling that requires the use of the APA style. The following book is cited often in this journal

    Cohen, J., Cohen, P., West, S. G., & Aiken, L. S. (2003). Applied Multiple Regression/Correlation Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

    If I use Zotero to cite this book using the APA style, the in-text citation is the following:

    (J. Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003)

    However, what this journal uses is the non-disambiguated version

    (Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003)


    You can check a sample citation in e.g. this article
    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10705510903438872

    Also, if you search for "(Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003)" on Google Scholar, the first few pages are mostly psychology journals that use the APA style. The disambiguated version "(J. Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003)" gives much less hits.
  • fbennett
    To avoid distraction from the other issues in the thread, let's continue the discussion in another:

    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/19570/option-to-disable-disambiguation/
  • mronkko
    Modified item 13 and added a couple of more items to the list:

    13) The dialog for choosing replacements for missing references should show the same columns as the insert citation dialog. And these should be selectable

    16) The user should be able to change search mode in the select items dialog

    17) Selected sources pane should show more fields

    18) The pop-up for editing citation details (prefix, suffix, etx) in the new QuickFormat citation picker should show item metadata.
  • Simon
    1, 3, 4, 12, 16, and 18 are reasonable suggestions.

    5 is already implemented on the trunk.

    I wouldn't object if someone were to submit a patch for 6, but I don't feel it's necessary enough to dedicate time to. You can already do this in the Firefox preferences.

    7 will happen eventually, but requires some changes on the web side.

    Re: 9, I would rather not add additional buttons to the Zotero toolbar. We have too many already. Instead, I'd like to make the first-run experience more pleasant (add popups with instructions on how to use important features), and add buttons to report errors to error dialogs.

    10 would take precious vertical space. If the current positioning is unsatisfactory, I'd prefer to find some other way of doing resolving that.

    Re: 11, I don't really like the idea of adding more buttons to the toolbar, but I can see how this might be useful.

    Re: 13 and 17, I don't plan to put more time into the "classic" add citation dialog. However, the columns for the select items dialog should probably be made selectable.
  • mronkko
    How about 2, 14, and 15?

    The idea to duplicate a firefox preference (6) is to make the download action feature easier to discover. But I agree that this is not important at all.

    I agree on the number of toolbar buttons. However, the current layout feels a bit confusing and I was thinking alternatives on how it can be made more clear.
  • Simon
    2 is not something I can comment on. (I'm not responsible for anything web-related.)

    14 is possible (I think), but I'm not sure it would get enough use to be considered high priority.

    I'm not sure off the top of my head how painful 15 is. (Getting the collection and item selection to persist was quite painful, but it might not be too painful to add this on top of that.) If it's not too painful, we will do it.
  • adamsmith
    edited September 20, 2011
    14 is very useful for manual data entry - ideally it would not just react to newline, but also to semicolon.
  • fcheslack
    2 is fine to the extent we associate invitations with accounts. I'm not sure how many people this would actually affect, but it's not a problem to do.
  • Simon
    1, 3, 4, 12, 13, 16, and 18 are now implemented on the trunk.
  • RintzeRintze
    19) When using the new citation dialog for Word (with Zotero Standalone 3.0b2.1), searching for "author-name year" and "year" filters correctly, but "year author-name" (e.g. "2007 Abbott") doesn't give any results.
  • adamsmith
    20) retrieve metadata for pdfs from google books consistently provides the same, wrong result for all books: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/18280/thats-not-the-article-i-retrieved-metadata-for/#Item_18
    the retrieve function should probably identify google books and then ignore the first page.
  • adamsmith
    21) Since we advise people to save titles in sentence case, provide right-click conversion to (pseudo) sentence case by right-clicking on the title in Zotero (instead of the current lowercase option). Can't find the old thread, but I believe Dan has agreed in the part that this'd make sense.
  • Simon
    21 is already implemented.
  • adamsmith
    oops! should have checked first. Thanks!
  • RintzeRintze
    22) With Word 2003 and Zotero Standalone 3.0b2.1, the cursor in the citation dialog disappears when I select an item from the results list with the mouse. I can only get it back by pressing the Tab key, which seems like an unnecessary step.
  • javimat
    23) In the info tab of an item, I think the 'Title short' field must be immediately after the 'Title' field.
  • RintzeRintze
    edited October 26, 2011
    24) It's rather confusing to have "Publication" and "Journal Abbr" as fields for journal articles. As with (23), it would make sense to group these together, and rename them for consistently, e.g. "Journal" and "Journal Abbr".
  • mronkko
    25) On OS X, when dragging an item over a collection, the mouse cursor should switch to "copy drag" cursor to make it more clear that the item is added to a collection instead of being moved. (Try alt drag on OS X Finder to see what I mean)
  • dstillman
    25 is done (closing a five-year-old ticket in the process).
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited October 30, 2011
    26) Allow me to make a request that was first made back in 2009. When importing an item from the clipboard, please create a mechanism that allows it to be directly imported into a collection instead of into its own collection.

    Here are the requested forum threads:

    In the thread: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/283/
    Dan Stillman wrote:

    "In Zotero 2.0: Select BibTeX text, copy to clipboard, and use "Import from Clipboard" in Zotero's gear menu (or open/focus the Zotero pane and use the keyboard shortcut specified in the Shortcut Keys pane of the Zotero prefs). This will currently create a new import collection each time, which it possibly shouldn't." (emphasis mine)

    See also

    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/10457/

    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15324/

    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/7867/
  • mronkko
    @DWL-SDCA: Can you edit your post to link to the original thread where this is requested?
  • adamsmith
    More generally - as I say above, I think the papercuts idea is great - I wonder if we can find a better place for it than the forum - likely a Wiki page. We could also use both parallel - this thread to gather, the Wiki to better display the requests and which ones have been answered.
  • ajlyon
    Can't we use tickets in Trac for the requests and their status, and add a "papercuts" report that we link to here and/or on the wiki? Unless Trac is on its way out, following the source code's migration.
  • RintzeRintze
    http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/source_code#issue_tracking
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