Upgrade StorageRequests from an organic chemist
- Image-based browsing of references
As an organic chemist, my primary means of recognizing papers of importance are by seeing the structures and transformations involved in graphical format; text-to-structure conversion in my head is inherently slow and sometimes impossible. When browsing online journals (Which consists of a ~large~ portion of my daily activities), my eye goes directly to the image indicating the subject of the paper.
In regards to Zotero, I have already been extensively storing the interesting or useful papers into my own personal library, annotating them in Acrobat Std as necessary. The more references I collect (even with effective organization) makes it very difficult to distinguish which papers are significant.
I would find the ability to display these images alongside the article title and author immensely useful. If Zotero cannot identify this image itself, I would be happy to copy and paste an image link for each reference for it to download. If coding this into the present text-based article list pane is too problematic, a separate generated page (ie dynamic html generation, etc) that is browseable would be wonderful.
- primary author specification
This is absolutely critical for Zotero to reach full effectiveness for my research; so much of what an article represents depends upon the individual research program of the leading professor. I need to be able to sort my papers by primary author. If Zotero cannot dynamically parse this, then I need the ability to specify it manually.
(personal, not inherently organic chemistry:
- external pdf reader integration
I use Adobe Acrobate Std to annotate my pdfs with markings to point out the important parts frequently. When pdfs are stored in Zotero, it would be very convenient to have a button that opens them in the default external reader, rather than within firefox)
As an organic chemist, my primary means of recognizing papers of importance are by seeing the structures and transformations involved in graphical format; text-to-structure conversion in my head is inherently slow and sometimes impossible. When browsing online journals (Which consists of a ~large~ portion of my daily activities), my eye goes directly to the image indicating the subject of the paper.
In regards to Zotero, I have already been extensively storing the interesting or useful papers into my own personal library, annotating them in Acrobat Std as necessary. The more references I collect (even with effective organization) makes it very difficult to distinguish which papers are significant.
I would find the ability to display these images alongside the article title and author immensely useful. If Zotero cannot identify this image itself, I would be happy to copy and paste an image link for each reference for it to download. If coding this into the present text-based article list pane is too problematic, a separate generated page (ie dynamic html generation, etc) that is browseable would be wonderful.
- primary author specification
This is absolutely critical for Zotero to reach full effectiveness for my research; so much of what an article represents depends upon the individual research program of the leading professor. I need to be able to sort my papers by primary author. If Zotero cannot dynamically parse this, then I need the ability to specify it manually.
(personal, not inherently organic chemistry:
- external pdf reader integration
I use Adobe Acrobate Std to annotate my pdfs with markings to point out the important parts frequently. When pdfs are stored in Zotero, it would be very convenient to have a button that opens them in the default external reader, rather than within firefox)
We have had this request a few times. Ticket created. https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/977
Re: Image-based browsing of references
We have had a few requests for this. For example people in art history want to browse through their collections by images as well. Sticking images in the icon slot next to a reference is, however, completely unacceptable. All those icons are 16x16 and it would all just look incomprehensible at that size. People have bounced around ideas about creating a way to view images, potentially in the metadata pane? Or it might make sense to show previews of attached images in the Attachments pane instead of just listing them? If there is general interest in this kind of thing we could create a ticket for it.
Re: external pdf reader integration
This is trickier. Currently Firefox does different things in different operating systems. For example on a Mac when you click the PDF icon it is opened up in whatever your native PDF program is. Not sure that there is any way for us to configure around this OS spesific kind of setting.
Image-based browsing:
I do like the metadata pane-display idea. I would be able to use my arrow keys to browse a folder while staying in the metadata pane, effectively browsing through the displayed images.
And I can guarantee this would be well appreciated by the chemists; the peers with whom I have shared the software capabilities would love that feature. (And some have gone to lengths to set this feature up in EndNote, representing to them the only thing that Zotero doesn't do better than EndNote)
http://pubs.acs.org/journals/orlef7/index.html
This shows the common wide-graphic format, and the amount of information conveyed in graphical formats.
Would Zotero even be able to dynamically identify and store these images as an option similar to automatically associating pdfs or taking webpage snapshots?
The main consideration is whether the images are displayed in the same way (or at least have similar URLs, e.g. with "/figures/" in them) across multiple publications on ACS Pubs. I've created a ticket—we'll look into it.
1. can there be more than one "primary author"?
2. can we not assume primary by default, and only qualify other contributions ("secondary"? "tertiary"? I dunno)
It may vary by discipline, but the vast majority of science papers involve single primary authors (sometimes indicated by asterisks or hatches or crosses). Indeed there are collaborations in which 2+ primary authors are listed along with their students. In those cases, I think the Zotero user would need to choose one of the authors as a basis for sorting (in the creator tab) and just deal with the fact that the other will only be displayed in the detailed information or in searches. Or, include both(all) of the primary authors as primary / sorting authors by default, and let the user strip the primary classification from the author that is not important to him/her manually.
As a special/rare case, one might be tracking the collected publications of a researcher from his/her secondary author days through his/her primary author days, in which the "primary/secondary" classification is not as important as simply the "creator" or "sort-by-me" classification.
2.
At least for my discipline, secondary/tertiary/etc would be insignificant compared to just having that primary author.
All in all, to me it's just about proper sorting.
Thanks!
OK, so is it fair to say that you care about "creators" and "other contributors"?
To me "primary author" seems almost redundant. A creator or author is almost by definition primarily responsible for the intellectual content of an article (or other work).
To put this in practical terms, what would be wrong with having one or two "author" contributors, and then five or ten "contributor" or "secondary contributor" ones? Would that not achieve the same effect but in more consistent ways?
I'm not trying to be difficult; just want to understand.
From the way that mrnlegato describes his idea of a "primary" author, it seems these concepts serve slightly different purposes. Indeed, many researchers I know remember papers by one or more of the more senior authors (as they generally have a greater body of work on the high level topic), while the "corresponding" author is often the more junior author who is intimately familiar with the lower level details.
With most scientific research articles, there's a team of students (undergrads, grads, and/or post-docs) working for their advisor. The advisor oversees the projects and is usually the overarching creative lead; he/she has a goal or vision or hope for what sort of science he/she is developing. Consequently each advisor's work develops a certain theme or style or subject that may be frequently revisited when one is interested in their work. In my field, these advisors turn into the inspiration, the hotshots, the artists, the experts, and their names are remembered and associated with particular examples of their science; the science is rarely remembered separate from their names. I believe this phenomenon is conserved across most of the research sciences, although it varies by discipline.
(It is true that in reality the professor's underlings are the ones due the credit for the years of hard work... but the "primary" classification was never intended to indicate that.)
If we're going into technicalities, I think it would be only fair to call everyone on the papers "authors" of some sort ("contributors" might seem to reduce the value of the years of work of the underlings, that indeed are often working more than their bosses).
http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/LC/
http://pubs.acs.org/journals/jacsat/
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/26737/home
As pointed out, this feature would obviously take up additional room, as such is it possible to have a button or an option to dissociate the zotero window from the current browsing window/tab to free up more of the firefox viewing space? I usually work on a duel display PC so it would be useful to me to have a fullscreen firefox on one monitor with a zotero window taking up a portion of the second monitor. I don't know if this is possible, but as an example, simialar to the zotero preferences box that appears as a separate window.
Thanks
I'm asking this question because I think it might have big implications for data modeling and citation formatting, both of which I have a practical interest in. Rather than explain it here, I just blogged it. In writing it, I think I've gotten more comfortable that the solution we're adopting give us enough flexibility that this isn't that big a deal, but it's a tricky subject!
From my user's perspective, it would be easiest if Zotero called everyone an "author" by default, then (if it's able to be parsed from the webpage) identified the primary authors and called them "primary author" (or whatever name you wish to apply). Also allowing for easy modification if it can't parse or if I want to change the primary author to suit my needs. Secondary / tertiary / etc (if that even exists) is unimportant to me personally