Sort by First Creator + year for the middle panel?

bijiaqing
Hi there,

Thanks for your effort on developing this useful tool.
I would really like to see the sorting feature that enables users to sort by First Creator (primary) + Year (secondary) in the middle panel on Zotero Desktop and/or Online.

Currently I can only sort by Creators + Year, which has brought huge confusions to me since I have many references from the same first author but with very random co-authors. In this case, the middle panel will be disordered if I sort by Creators + Year.

Besides, I would also suggest the feature of displaying the last name + first initial of the first creator as a column. It helps a lot for fields where many people have the same last names.

Thanks again.
  • dstillman
    I'm not sure if we'll do this, or when, but I've created an issue to track it.

    It's not quite the same thing, but you may prefer setting the sortCreatorAsString option in the Config Editor in the Advanced pane of the Zotero preferences to true, which will cause it to sort just by the visible string. That would ensure that creator strings like "Chan et al." and "Chan et al." are treated as equivalent, regardless of the secondary authors, but it also would sort Victoria Chan (2012) before Michael Chan (2015).
  • bijiaqing
    Hi Dan,

    Thanks for the reply.

    sortCreatorAsString = True can solve the problem to some extent, as long as one neglects the first name ambiguity. Just to mention, it will also treat "Chan et al. (2020)", "Chan and Lee (2015)", and "Chan (2013)" differently, even they share the same first author.

    I totally understand your opinion. But I still hope that we could see the feature some day in the future.

    Best wishes,
    Jiaqing
  • qqbb
    You can achieve this by creating a citation key column with the Better BibTeX add-on.
  • bijiaqing
    Awesome! That is exactly what I was dreaming for!
Sign In or Register to comment.