Add the tag of a reference to its note text

dstillman Zotero Team
This discussion was created from comments split from: Tags - what could be improved.
  • KangJiefeng
    Is it possible to add the tag of a reference to its note text? When I do reference management, I tag the reference based on their topics or how I am going to use them in the future. For example, some have the tag "NewMethod", some are "ResearchGap". Then, after tagging them, I do note. For the references with the tag "NewMethod", I make a note and write down what method they use. This part of the note text is related to the tag "NewMethod", so I usually add the text "#NewMethod" before this part of note text. And here is the problem: now I want to change the name of the tag, that is easy; however, I also need to change the text "#NewMethod" in my note, and I can only do that manually and one by one.
  • alflamingo
    edited April 19, 2023
    @kang1943 what you describe seems to match the case for creating a note from a template where a line is dedicated to tags, see : https://www.zotero.org/support/note_templates. NewMethod tag should appear as text in the note you will create from the template (described in the documentation). About changing tags, to my knowledge yes you can use templates so you don't have to edit it manually. However, you will have to re-create the corresponding notes. This is not so bad because in that way you can keep the information related to the date and the hour you changed your tags. So your project maintains a memory of the changes you make.

    Please also note that your post might correspond to another topic and would have been better placed creating a new specific thread (see forum guidelines https://www.zotero.org/support/forum_guidelines for more).
  • KangJiefeng
    @alflamingo Thank you for your reply, I tried the template configuration (modify the note template then add notes based on annotation) - it extracts the tags in the PDF file automatically, but what I want to do is to extract the tags from the item meta-data. In other words, users can either add a tag to the PDF attachment or the item and what I want to do is to extract the tags of the latter.
    Sorry for creating a redundant thread, and thank you @alflamingo @dstillman for your reminder. In fact, I realized there is a thread called "Tags - what could be improved", but I am not sure if my question is related to an existing feature or it is something "could be improved", so I created this new thread. Could you remove this thread (I am OK with that). I have made a conclusion about the content above, and I will post the information to the thread "Tags - what could be improved" if you remove this one.
  • alflamingo
    edited April 19, 2023
    Ah I see, mmm I don't think that is possible. Maybe with some third-party plugins like the ones that work with obsidian, but I can't be sure and you will probably have to do some set up. Edit: yes you can do it using Mdnotes module - which doesn't require to use obsidian: https://github.com/argenos/zotero-mdnotes
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited April 19, 2023
    In fact, I realized there is a thread called "Tags - what could be improved", but I am not sure if my question is related to an existing feature or it is something "could be improved", so I created this new thread.
    No, you didn't — you posted to that thread, and I split it off, because generic feature-request threads aren't helpful. See the forum guidelines alflamingo linked to above.
  • KangJiefeng
    @dstillman Oh... my bad memory... Got it.
    @alflamingo Thank you for the information.
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