Plain Text Advanced Search?
I am switching from Mendeley to Zotero, and I'm finding one of the major disadvantages is the search capability in Zotero, and it seems like it could very easily improved upon by offering a simple text-based advanced search with boolean operators.
I'm first asking if this feature already exists, and I'm just not aware. If not, I would like to find out how I could strongly encourage having it added to the roadmap.
I provide two examples to explain the utility of this feature.
One example:
In Mendeley, I could simply run a search like "author:Fang" by typing into the search box.
In Zotero, I have to click the magnifying glass, then find "Creator" in the menu, and then type "Fang". This takes MUCH longer.
Another example:
I refer to a Latex document that I wrote some time ago. It's relatively easy to look at a citation and construct a string like this "Ropel2005 OR Freed1976 OR Jeschke2013 OR Nussinov2016 OR Stillman1980a OR Shapiro2011a OR Simoncelli1996"
In Mendeley, this pulls up a list of the citations.
In Zotero, I have to click the magnifying glass, find "Extra" in the list, then copy and paste, then press "+", then find "Extra" again and repeat seven times.
I'm first asking if this feature already exists, and I'm just not aware. If not, I would like to find out how I could strongly encourage having it added to the roadmap.
I provide two examples to explain the utility of this feature.
One example:
In Mendeley, I could simply run a search like "author:Fang" by typing into the search box.
In Zotero, I have to click the magnifying glass, then find "Creator" in the menu, and then type "Fang". This takes MUCH longer.
Another example:
I refer to a Latex document that I wrote some time ago. It's relatively easy to look at a citation and construct a string like this "Ropel2005 OR Freed1976 OR Jeschke2013 OR Nussinov2016 OR Stillman1980a OR Shapiro2011a OR Simoncelli1996"
In Mendeley, this pulls up a list of the citations.
In Zotero, I have to click the magnifying glass, find "Extra" in the list, then copy and paste, then press "+", then find "Extra" again and repeat seven times.
The search bar will likely gain some additional functionality in future versions, but neither of these seem like they'd hold you back too much. (And as far as I know Zotero's advanced/saved search functionality is way more powerful than what Mendeley offers.)
Especially boolean searches involve a _lot_ of clicking in Zotero.
Obviously somewhat depends on how difficult this is to implement, but I don't think there's much of a question that it'd be desirable.
In terms of implementation difficulty, it depends.
I think it'd be trivial to support boolean logic based on the existing search modes — e.g., "smith AND (1980 OR 1982)" in "Title, Creator, Year" mode.
A field-based approach would be more complicated because of UI issues, since 1) it'd have to somehow interact with, override, or supplement the existing search modes (e.g., what happens if you type "publisher:harcourt" in "Title, Creator, Year" mode?) and 2) there are a ton of fields in Zotero, and we'd want to provide a search UI that autocompleted those and turned them into bubbled labels.
The searches that I'm trying to do are quite reasonable, actually.
Say you have a latex document with a list of citations. You want to bring them all up, so you can see at a glance which one you were thinking about. In this case, searching one by one doesn't make sense, because each corresponds to copying and pasting from another window, which takes time. Again, this is just one small example that I provided, I'm sure people could think up many more.
Perhaps a more basic option:
Say I have 200 articles by author A, and 50 by author B, and I'm looking for an article published by authors A AND B. I can do that probably 5x faster if I'm allowed to do it from the basic search box with clear text rather than have to bring up the advanced search window and construct the search that way.
Specifically responding to the comments from @dstillman, I am more than willing -- asking, if fact -- how I can "not overcomplicate my searches" by doing them the "Zotero way," but I have tried and can't figure out how to do that.
I have a relatively large library, and I find that the basic searches return a lot of noise.
As to the power of the advanced search: Honestly, it doesn't really matter how powerful a search is if you need to click through many buttons and menu options to implement it.
My options currently seem to be using the basic searches and getting tons of noise, or spending a full minute each time I want to click through the options for an advanced search.
Implementing simple boolean logic in the basic search boxes seems like a MUCH better way to go.
The LaTeX example still strikes me as fairly esoteric, but you can open the Advanced Search window with a single click and then, if you like, do the rest entirely with the keyboard: select a search condition (e.g., "Creator") by typing the first few letters ("cr" would suffice) with the drop-down selected, Tab over to enter a value, and press Shift-Enter to add a new row. (It would probably be a nice improvement to make a new row default to the same condition as the previous row.)
To be clear, I'm not saying that additional functionality in the search bar wouldn't be useful, and, as I say, we can probably add boolean logic easily. These things just aren't common requests (or, at least in the case of boolean logic, we would've done it years ago).
One somewhat common request we do get, for what it's worth, is to be able to use a combination of "AND" and "OR" in a single advanced/saved search. That's currently possible only by using a nested saved search. We'll address that in the UI at some point, but supporting boolean logic in the search bar could satisfy at least some of that demand (and more if labels are implemented). Well, that's certainly not true. You can easily construct all sorts of searches in Zotero that simply aren't possible in Mendeley, and you can turn those into saved searches, which Mendeley doesn't support at all.
I can see the appeal of the field-shortcuts in searches (which is why they're supported by most good online academic databases) but I'd very much doubt they'd see much use.
1990-1999
Probably the single most common task I do searching is to list authors them sort by date to get to the decade I know a paper is in but can’t remember.