Would love to see this implemented! I share my exact opinion on the matter with user:


baberahamlincln Dec 4th 2010
"Hello,

I am using Zotero to write my PhD thesis. I already have about 300 items in my library, and by the end of this I may have over 1000. Some I will want to use again and again, others just once. I would really appreciate a simple 1-5 stars rating system to flag those items that are particularly relevant or may be of future use to me. Please include this feature in the next update! By the way, I love Zotero. It works fantastically. I can't believe all my colleagues are still using EndNote"

@raik
"IMO, 1-5 star rating does not make sense. 1-5 star ratings are typically used to display an average over hundreds of user ratings."

It depends the way you are using this stars rating. For me, 3 stars are not enough. 5 stars will have the following meaning:
0 star : not classed
1 star : uninteresting
2 stars : poorly interesting
3 stars : in the mid range
4 stars : interesting but either with defaults or too complicated
5 stars : to use undoubtly

Cheers

I came here to ask a similar question: I want to be able to highlight certain items so that they pop up in a collection. The stars rating alone doesn't work for me, because I want to be able to create multiple groupings within a collection. The star rating system allows for ranking based on importance, whereas I want to be able to have other bases for grouping items such as which chapter or section this item is relevant for, or whether the item is relevant for its empirical material or its conceptual/theoretical significance.

So the best would be if there is a stars rating system based on importance, but also a colored-highlighting system that you can organize items within a collection based on other needs. The information in the link Garcile provided seems to be about using colored tags in the Tags window. I am talking about colored highlighting that is immediately visible on items in a collection. It would be great if this feature would be available just by right-clicking on an item and selecting "Tag" which would give another pop-up menu with different colors available. Better yet, it would be great if we could define what we would want each color to mean. For example I would right-click on an item, select "Tag", and then select "Red" which I would define as, say, Chp 1. And then I can select a star-rating within this "red" group, which would remind me later that this particular item is, say, 5 stars-very important for my chapter 1. I would see this immediately as I open the collection without having to go into the tabs window. This would allow me to compare items within a collection without going back and forth between tag windows of different items.

Hope such a future is introduced at some point.

Yes and I had mentioned this in my post: "The information in the link Garcile provided seems to be about using colored tags in the Tags window. I am talking about colored highlighting that is immediately visible on items in a collection. "

I found the information in the link a bit confusing. And even if it does what I say (ie highlight the whole item in the main window) it is still too many steps to do it (or remove it) fast. What I ask is explained in the second paragraph of my post

It is either that I am misunderstanding the information provided in this link or my Zotero is not up to date because when I go to the Tag Selector, I cannot right click on anything here. When I right click, nothing happens. Control-click also does not select more than one tag as it says it should in the link.. I'll try to update my Zotero and see if it works.

OK I was not looking at the tag selector on the bottom left, I have to admit I did not know such a box existed down there on the left. The image on the user guide page does not show where that box is.

Yes it does work as you say and it is quite useful for the kind of work I do but I am not sure how it will work in our group library (i.e. what will happen when different library members select different tag colors for the same tags, or how can we differentiate tag colors that are relevant for one member but not others for eg.).

Also, this still does not fully meet the need that I was describing. I want to be able to mark particular items within a collection not in terms of what tags it has but in terms of its degree of importance in that collection only (i.e. mark items that I should give priority to - the star rating would solve this) and also mark items in terms of what paper or what chapter of a book they are relevant for (the star rating would not help with this). I guess the colored tags can be used for one of these functions by using very specific tags (like `"read this article first" or "this article belongs to xx book chp 1" etc) but then I would not be able to use them to highlight actual tags. So I would still prefer it if Zotero had both the star rating, and an additional function like right-click on an item (not a tag) to highlight in different colors so as to group items within a collection. It would be great if we can have both these functions along with the existing colored tags.

In our team project we are examining about 80 non-academic journals and magazines and creating a database of articles that appear in these journals on a select group of topics. We created subcollections in our group library for each journal, and each subcollection includes articles we selected in that particular journal. So the colored tag feature is very useful for us to highlight/group articles that appear in that particular journal based on different topics, which are indicated in tags. But if we use the colored tag option for this purpose, we can't really use it for anything else like ranking the articles in a collection according to importance - which would be very useful for us as well - or grouping them according to their function (like, for example, who among our 7-member team would find that particular article relevant). The colored tag option is really great, but I wish there were one or two more options that would allow us to group and highlight items in different ways.

if use colored tag, please provide more colors or customize color tags

Me too, a five star rating system would be very useful.

I also would truly appreciate a 5-star, or number scale (1-10), rating system. These should be easily assigned to keyboard shortcuts, like number keys.

(I use a little app called "Stars" for iTunes this way... It's fantastic as I can just rate music tracks while listening, without even having to switch back to the app...)

Why has a star system still not been implemented? It looks like people have been asking for over 10 years! Add another vote to put a star & flag column to allow for additional sorting.

@SommerEngineering: You can set up your own system with tags (colored or otherwise). We might add a "favorite" mechanism at some point, but we're not going to support custom rating systems.

I just independently 'invented' the same strategy as suggested by @Guillaume L in 2015 1) to add the "extra" column to the database (shows up for all entries) and 2) to add 1-5 asterisks (or any character) to selected entries to reflect the importance of that entry to me. An orthogonal measure I was using was citation count (which reflects the importance of the entry to the community at large). Seems many people have adopted this approach. I would support adding the clickable stars as a bespoke system in Zotero which would be *slightly* easier than entering your own charachters on keyboard (but less granular in the information it could encode, e.g. using different characters).