"Related" indicator

Heckscher
I occasionally use the "Related" tab to crossreference articles. The problem is that when I go back to those articles there is way of knowing that a Related link exists unless I go and click on the tab. Could there be some visual indication of the existence of a Related link? -- such as coloring the tab, or adding some marker to it? Then I would know I need to click it. (This might be useful for the Tags and Notes tabs as well, but less important for me at least.)

I see that there have been some previous requests for something like this but they don't seem to have gotten a response, and it's been a while, so I thought I'd start a new discussion on it. (http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/178/related-tab/)

Zotero is so wonderful that I hesitate to ask for more! Let me just express my thanks...
  • Julia Thornton
    I agree. It would be lovely to have tabs change colour when they have items added. I sometimes rush through adding tags if I'm on a roll with finding items to add. This means I skip adding tags to some entries. I end up making good by occasionally manually trawling through to find the missed ones. Tedious. But I also totally agree about an indicator for "related", and have had the same thought myself.
  • ketchell
    Until a relational framework could be implemented, an indicator for related would be extremely helpful. For immediate purposes simply adding a link for under each of the two items under each would allow the current unknown relationship to be immediately apparent and available to navigate, rather than the current situation where knowing if there even is a relationship requires checking each item individually. There is probably a better way than this idea.
  • ajlyon
    I agree on adding a visible indicator-- it's pretty hard to remember what has related items, and it seems pretty inconvenient to have to open that tab to see whether something has relations.
  • Gracile
    A solution would be to add the number of related items directly in the tab "Related". Screenshot here.

    Discussed there: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/14153/related-tab-advanced-search-functionality/#Item_8
  • JonEP
    Agreed agreed -- this would be so helpful.

    The solution proposed by Gracile is quite good. Another option would be for there to be a small note attached to the entry -- just as when you write a note in the notes tab. Then you could click on the arrow to the left, and among the attachments you'd see a single "related" note, itself populated with a brief list of entries (creator, date, title?) indicating the related articles.

    Hope this can be implemented -- as it is, I'm hesitated to spend time creating "related" links as I am afraid I will fail to notice them when I return to the article.

    Thanks.
  • JonEP
    Hi, I'd like to just re-affirm how useful it would be to have some sort of indicator to let the user know that there are related items.
  • Gracile
    https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/175
  • Julia Thornton
    Yes yes! I would love someone to implement an indicator of related items! It would save me writing a note for every item which has a 'related' connection as I currently do to alert me to look there. Making the tab change colour after making an entry would be relatively simple, even if the user manually clicked to change the colour.
    It would be even better if there was also an indication of the type of relationship as was first discussed on this forum back in 2007 http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1317/semantic-relations/#Item_27

    A simple tag-and-colour user driven labelling system for each related item would work ok for that too. (As for instance email tags work in some email systems)
  • andybrandy
    +1
  • adamsmith
    andy - adding +1 to old threads really doesn't add anything, in particular not on threads where there is no disagreement on the desirability of the feature and/or where like in this thread where a pull request with a patch already exists. If you want to subscribe to a thread you can do that on the left.
  • andybrandy
    Ok, got it.
    Just thought after a year of just using it I'll take another look and add a comment. If I just agree, I thought a '+1' might do it.
  • JonEP
    Hi, I visited github (https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/175) and it looks like great progress was made on this and then it was dropped - there is no milestone and no assignee (should there be?)...

    I know everyone thinks its useful (if perhaps it makes the space too busy) -- so not sure why it wouldn't go forward. About 10% of my items have "related" entries, but I seldom check out those links because I don't think to look at that tab. Having even an asterisk there to tell me that this particularly entry has a related paper or two would be so useful.

    Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    No one quite knows what happened. Dan has apologized for neglecting this pull request at some point and I'm not sure if he still considers this something he'd review if it were updated, which now likely would require some extra work.

    (Though FWIW, Zotero mostly works without assigning and milestones, so the absence of those doesn't mean much).
  • dionymnia
    Is there any chance that adding a "Related" indicator is still being considered or planned?

    (Sorry for necro'ing an older thread, but I didn't want to start yet another thread on the same topic.)
  • JB88
    Not sure what happened to this thread, but this would be a great feature. I hope it's still on the drawing board.
  • qqbb
    This is a related recent discussion:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/82258/suggestion-request-regarding-metadata-presentation
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