Number of references

drhardy
Is there a way to easily see how many references are in a given folder. In Endnote and Mendeley when I am in a folder it will show the number of items in the folder at the bottom of the window. In other words, I'm doing a systematic review and will be coding articles into different folders, and will be reporting number of studies that have particular methodological features. Will be nice to easily figure out how many I sorted in a given folder.
  • adamsmith
    If you click on a collection in the left, that number is shown on the right. It disappears as soon as you look at an individual reference within that collection.

    You might be aware, but especially if you're using collections for analytic purpose, make sure you understand how they differ from folders: https://www.zotero.org/support/collections_and_tags#the_zotero_collections_model
  • bwiernik
    For the reason that adamsmith mentions, I use tags for this purpose when I do a systematic review. If I have a set of mutually exclusive design features that I want to count, it is much easier to filter on a tag and then see if any of the other design feature tags remain visible in the tag selector (indicating that I need to correct a tag for some items) than it is to do the same with collections. I give such tags a prefix (e.g., f: ) so that they all group together in the tag selector.

    Also, if you haven’t already, I would recommend making a separate Group library for your systematic review references that is separate from your general reference library.
  • adamsmith
    @bwiernik -- you should write a paper on this. Should be quick, you either put it up as a working paper or in a systematic-review heavy journal with a low threshold. Sure to get a bunch of citations & will be very useful for people.
  • bwiernik
    @adamsmith That’s a good idea. I write these types of posts often enough...
  • G-Radiation
    I am late to the discussion, but adding to the original request: It would be really nice if there was an option to display the number of citations that a collection contains next to it. There could also be an option for whether or not this includes subcollections. This would make it a bit easier to see, in which area I need to do more research.

    @bwiernik I would definitely like to read it if you ever write a paper or extended blog post about this topic!
  • bwiernik
    Do you mean how many times the items in a collection have been cited in the literature? Or in your own documents?

    There are two plugins that can retrieve citation counts for items
    https://github.com/eschnett/zotero-citationcounts
    https://github.com/MaxKuehn/zotero-scholar-citations
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