Can I get a record ID number?

cricketbird · December 30, 2008

I take a lot of notes from papers, and I organize my notes by subject, not the paper they came from. When I used EndNote, I could just write "243" by my note from paper #243 and know where that note came from. I could also, in Word, write "The sky is blue [243]" and EndNote would fill in the appropriate reference. This was a wonderful shorthand way to deal with a lot of references.

Is there any field in Zotero that is the ID number?

dsjolie · January 4, 2009

I would also like to have a constant and compact ID for each reference in the database... I use the number you get when generating report in some contexts now (eg 16638 in zotero://report/items/16638/html/report.html) but I don't know it that is a stable solution?

I would like some ID based on "date added" the most...

scot · January 6, 2009

The forward-thinking members of this forum might be quick to comment how limited and problematic such a number would be (see, for example the comments on BibTeX references). It would wreak havoc as soon as you try to share your database, and that what we really need are globally unique identifiers instead. They're certainly right about global IDs. But I also can't help wishing for something like what this poster suggests, some identifier which would be unique to my database alone, human-usable (for indexing, or manual use in post-processing citation methods for those word processors and text editors which Zotero doesn't now support). Surely a there would be a way to create and maintain an (optional) strictly local identifier (numerical, BibTeX type or other), to be used for those applications where an universal document identifier is just too cumbersome for us regular people.

I fully understand that this competes with other useful additions and refinements.