Nested tags (subtags)

z8080 · November 14, 2011

Hello,

I was wondering whether the developers have considered implementing a nested tags (labels) system in Zotero, such as for example the one found in Gmail, which allows you to add labels to an email that are "sublabels" of another label.

So, for example, in Zotero, I might have a tag "Review papers" and then subtags such as "Review papers | Nature" etc. Of course, one could just create many tags, but this just makes your tags cluttered and difficult to browse through, whereas if you were able to define certain tags as being hierarchically "nested" under another tag, this would really allow much better/logical organisation of your Zotero items.

It would be great if the developers gave this one a thought - many thanks!

Catalin

adamsmith · November 14, 2011

You can search the forum for hierarchical tags - there's a long discussion on this. My sense is that it wasn't something that won devs over.
Note, that collections are, in effect, hierarchical tags if you want to use them that way.

abhirkmv · April 1, 2014

Since an article can be only in one collection, it is probably not correct to say that (sub)collections are hierarchical tags. I have many (inter-disciplinary) articles that I would want to simultaneously keep (w/o duplicating) at different nodes in my tree of (sub)topics.

adamsmith · April 1, 2014

Since an article can be only in one collection

that's incorrect. The same article can be in multiple collections (collections are _not_ like folders in your OS), that was the whole basis for my comment. It's still possible that hierarchical tags of some type will make it - there are certainly good arguments for tags over collections - but it won't be any time soon.

abhirkmv · April 1, 2014

Thanks a lot for your clarification. And sorry for not doing my research before posting. Indeed, I was able to put an article in two collections and the associated PDF file was not duplicated.