Viewing Notes without Sources
The main thing standing between me (with other Scribe users) and Zotero is the ability to view (not just produce reports, in the actual Zotero interface) my notes in alphabetical, numerical, chronological order without having them grouped by parent or source.
This seems like both a crucial feature for any note taking software, as the forums I have participated in for both Scribe and Zotero have shown. It also seems like a feature that could be somewhat painlessly integrated (wishful thinking? The advanced search suggests that it has this capability with a check box, but alas, does no such thing)
This seems like both a crucial feature for any note taking software, as the forums I have participated in for both Scribe and Zotero have shown. It also seems like a feature that could be somewhat painlessly integrated (wishful thinking? The advanced search suggests that it has this capability with a check box, but alas, does no such thing)
"Output full content of notes in bibliography-mode Quick Copy if only copying notes; otherwise, exclude notes from generated bibliography"
Does this solve the problem presented in this forum? Meaning, does this additional function enable us to generate alphabetical/chronological reports of notes (children) without having them automatically (and unavoidably) sorted under source (parent) groupings?
If it does, where would I find instructions on how to use this function?
Look for "combineChildItems" on that page.
It's not currently possible to display notes separated from their parents in the Zotero interface itself.
Thanks Dan, Perhaps you can offer me an alternative method for approaching the problem the absence of this feature creates.
At the moment I have a few thousand notes from a few hundred sources. I have titled every note with a date, 1915 01 01, for example, followed by a descriptor. At this stage in my research it is necessary that I move through my notes one by one and in chronological order to add appropriate tags so that they can then be grouped thematically.
If I could somehow view only my notes sorted by title without being grouped under their parent items (an impossibility I understand), I would be able to move through the chronologically ordered list and simply drag and drop them into tag bundles with ease.
It seems my only other option is to generate a report with my notes in order by their titles (chronological) and then search out and manually change the tags of each one in Zotero, flipping back and forth between the report and Zotero and searching out each note each time.
As you can see, the report option would take an incredible amount of time comparatively. Any ideas on how to get around this? Thanks David
When you can sort through notes like old-fashioned notecards or Scribe, irrespective of their sources (for which naturally one needs an indication to be able to pull it when necessary), it's not only much easier to find what you're looking for, but things you'd forgotten spring up. Things that didn't seem important before take on new meaning. Despite all the fabulous features offered by Zotero-and fabuous they are- after months of using it, I'm finding that information is bogging down rather than springing up. We mustn't forget that in any paper or book, content comes first, the bibliography follows.
I'm glad to know there's a ticket to address this issue for those of us who feel this way. I just wanted to add another voice to the ranks that are in the same state of hopeful expectation. Thanks for all your great work. Letitia
This will indeed be much faster when Zotero can display notes without their parents.
Indeed it would, considering the age of this forum and the ticket meant to address this feature, could you comment on the priority level of such an addition?
I understand, of course, that promising ETA on these kind of things is probably discouraged. However, considering that we have professionals trying to decide whether or not to switch to alternative software, might you offer us an opinion as to whether we should stick it out a bit longer or move on if this feature is simply too essential to do without at present?
Thanks again for your attentiveness to our inquiries and demands. David
"Considering the age of this forum and the ticket meant to address this feature, could you comment on the priority level of such an addition?
I understand, of course, that promising ETA on these kind of things is probably discouraged. However, considering that we have professionals trying to decide whether or not to switch to alternative software, might you offer us an opinion as to whether we should stick it out a bit longer or move on if this feature is simply too essential to do without at present?
Thanks again for your attentiveness to our inquiries and demands. David"
Obviously, though, notes as currently available aren't useless per se, they are just useless to you. If you look around here, there are a large amount of features that people find "dealbreakers", "absolutely essential" etc. there is no way they are all going to happen soon.
I became excited about this software and began promoting it, because I bought into the vision of a research tool being written by people who do research. Research is more than just bib management.
If note taking is not going to be given any priority, then get creative and integrate with a good tool. Better yet, declare note taking dead and challenge someone else to take up the gauntlet of integrating a note system with this one. This however, makes little sense coming the group that at one time had Scribe on the market.
And I haven't even talked about it's potential impact in poorer countries.
and was aljyon says about plugin development.
This is not a matter of bibliographic management vs. notetaking--Zotero is already more than a bibliographic management tool, and it's notetaking features are quire robust. It's a matter of closing tickets required for humanities work. There are quite a few tickets on humanities styles requirements that are also being postponed while other tickets are being filled (for example, dedicated field for archives, address for letters, original publication date, and formatting of film references). Rigorous humanities research requires these, as it does the few notetaking features requested here.
The argument that "not everyone needs this" is not exactly valid in this case--obviously not all Zotero users are historians or film scholars, but developers added plenty of features for legal scholars lately and not every Zotero user is a legal scholar either.
My point concerning "not everyone needs this" is not that it shouldn't been done (I think it should, though we may have different opinions on the level of priority), but that comments such as current notes being "useless" or "should be declared dead" are misplaced and unnecessarily negative and antagonizing.
@Dan S.: I understand that notetaking stuff is not a priority, but would it be possible to close the archives ticket? I can add the field myself I think, but then the data needs to be moved afterwards.
Like all of us I do want Zotero to be as useful as possible to as many people as possible and you definitely are among the people who make that happen.