Find items belonging to zero collection (orphans)

alnlhsts
I want to sort all the items of My Library in my collections, and want to dispatch all of them in one or more collections (because I keep paper copies of my articles and they are stored in real folders at my office, this is the way I work). I want no item to remain orphan, i.e. not attached to at least one collection. Sorry to insist but I want to make my point as clear as possible. This way when I collect new items on the web, I am certain to have sorted them. I like the idea of a library "propre et en ordre" as swiss use to say.
And I see no way to that in Zotero.
Any suggestions?
Alain
  • Bionatsci
    The way I achieve this is to always have an appropriate collection selected in Zotero when collecting items from the web - Zotero adds items to the currently selected collection. To be precise my workflow is:

    1. Find an item online
    2. Open the Zotero pane
    3. Select the appropriate collection (or make a new one if none exists).
    4. Grab the item with Zotero
    5. Close the Zotero pane
    You do have to be vigilant about this however.

    One thing to watch if you want to avoid creating orphans is the fact that "remove selected item" removes the item from the current collection but not from the library, so if an item is in only one collection and you click "remove selected item" you have made an orphan. To totally remove an item you need to click "delete selected item from library".

    You are right that once an item becomes orphaned it is rather tricky to find it, a ticket does exist which should fix this once implemented.
  • Bionatsci
    Apologies, I failed to read the title of your post, so I got the wrong end of the stick somewhat. The ticket I linked to above will address your feature request once implemented.

    P.S. Could I take this opportunity to bump this ticket - I'm sure I have accumulated some orphans in my library (it's so easy to do), and it would be nice to be able find them and deal with them.
  • alnlhsts
    I follow your approach but do not find it very practical; thanks for help anyway.
    I was aware of the distinction between the "remove from collection" which is not a complete suppression and the "remove from library" which discards for real the item.
    I support the ticket you mentioned, in the same type of utilities as the much needed remove duplicate.
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