I have noticed this addition to the new versions of Zotero

"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?

Thanks Dan. I'm eager to switch to Zotero, but have to wait until the interface can display notes on their own with reasonable sorting capabilities as well as generate reports of the same nature. Am I correct in thinking there is a ticket pending for that function?

Tickets to hide non-matching items and to only include child items of matching items in advanced search also seem relevant to this request.

"Hide non-matching items" has not yet been implemented, but, as you probably know, the behavior of Select All has been changed to address your other, related request.

I am so grateful to dpgetman for putting this issue so well. I am in the same boat. I now have thousands of sources referenced, most with a single note attached. I've tagged them and sorted them into countless categories and sub categories, yet it still requires remembering what I've found or sorting through often source titles rather than content.

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

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.

The only way to speed this up a little would be to do a saved search on "item type" [is] "note," then generate a report sorted by note title--at least then you'll get all notes sorted in chronological order. Then print out a report, go through it adding tags in writing, then search and add tags to each note manually.

This will indeed be much faster when Zotero can display notes without their parents.

dan can answer the priority question better than i can--a lot of other things need to be done as well. thank you for your patience, elena

Dan Stillman and erazlogo, at the risk of being redundant, could I ask once again:

"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"

honestly I don't think Zotero will be able to compete with powerful note-taking software in any foreseeable future. It's before all a bibliographic management program and I think that's where developers have (imho rightly) put most of their work - and there is still some important work left to do. If you rely heavily on the capacity to organize and customize notes in a variety of ways, you'll probably want to look for something else in addition to Zotero.

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.

Remember that Zotero needs more dedicated developers in order to move through the long list of very important improvements with any speed. There is probably room for a Scribe replacement that does things like advanced notes management, person cards, and place cards-- and that replacement could easily be a Zotero plugin. If the historians and humanists out there want to make this happen, then the best way is to secure funding and programmers to do it. It only takes a few dozen Endnote licenses to pay for a fair amount of development. (I'd start writing one myself, but, like many others, I have a Ph.D. to finish.)

I'm not in a hurry to see it happen today, but I hope Zotero will implement the tickets linked from this thread eventually.

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.

Adam--

Frank Bennett - a legal scholar - has volunteered what must by now be hundreds of hours of his time and his considerable skill to advance these things. I'm sure no one would complain if a historian or literary scholar were to put in a comparable effort to develop an advanced note-taking feature for integration with Zotero.

Several features for humanities scholars in Zotero were added because I worked on them (Chicago styles for example), putting in quite a few hours over the years.

@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.

The note review features discussed here would be great to have. Re the field issues, we should definitely work on that list. It's a separate topic, I'll start another thread.

thanks Frank and sorry Elena if I came across as contentious - that was not intended and most certainly not directed at you.
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.

I love zotero, feel tremendous gratitude to all who have made it possible and continue to make it better, and enthusiastically recommend it to colleagues and students. I'm an historian. I switched from Endnote and Filemaker Pro a couple of years ago and am finally moving on from the bibliography-building phase to intensive research on a new book project. I'd hoped this whole time that I'd be able to use Zotero as an alternative both for Endnote AND for FMP (for my note-management). Having read this thread I'm ready to abandon hope that the notes side of this application will work for me. Like others who have posted above, I need to be able to step back from thousands of notes at the end of the process and sort them into various ways based on fields (date, location, keyword, etc), without having them tied to parents. Given that a few folks have already asked the developers for an ETA on developing improved note-management capabilities and have not been answered, I'm figuring it's time to look elsewhere. I'd be grateful to hear from others struggling with this issue about what alternative programs they are considering. Is anyone aware of good discussions online about the virtues and limitations of other programs in this regard (I have an ancient version of FMP, and am open to alternatives)? And I'd *really* love to make this work on Zotero and would be willing to wait if I had confidence that a fix was looming in the near term...Another user asking humbly for an ETA on a fix. Again, thanks for the wonderful program.