Add columns to view

geneticmaize
New Zotero user here, any help is appreciated :)

I'd like to add additional columns to the library view on both the Mac desktop version and on the website. But the columns I want to add are not in the options I can select. For example, I'd like to add DOI, ISSN, and Abstract so I can easily sort and see which items are missing information. I'd also like to add Key as a column. Is there a way to add these to the view?
  • adamsmith
    While you can add columns by clicking on the small table icon at the top right of the middle column, none of the ones you want is available

    It's pretty easy to create a saved search for, e.g. journal articles without DOI, though. Under advanced search (magnifying glass):
    Item type -- is -- Journal article
    DOI -- does not contain -- [leave the field empty]

    Same idea for abstract and ISSN
  • emilianoeheyns
    If you write a plugin for it, then yes.

    What key would you want to see? The other fields I know, but I don't know of a zotero "key" field that would be meaningful to users. There is one, but it's just the internal ID.

    But if you want to easily see which items are missing, a saved search is a lot easier and future-proof, eg "DOI does not contain ." will find all items that don't have a DOI.
  • geneticmaize
    Ok, using a search does make sense. Thanks!

    Yes, for Key I mean the internal ID. I have a lot of additional information that I need to collect for each study, and I need a way to connect that info to the citations. DOI is a messy identifier with inconsistent length, so I was thinking the Key would work nicely. The Key is present on the Export CSV, but it would be nice to see it in the Library, too.
  • emilianoeheyns
    That can only be done with a plugin currently
  • geneticmaize
    Thanks. Is there perhaps a list of existing plugins somewhere that I might check?
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited February 18, 2019
    There's no plugin currently that will do what you want, but the list is here. One (Better BibTeX) exposes a key (the bibtex key, not the internal Zotero key), but that's a very heavyweight plugin for your purposes, I wouldn't recommend using it for this purpose alone. Also, the CSV translator will currently not export the BBT key
  • bwiernik
    If you want to look up DOIs for items and tag items for which DOIs can't be found (or which have invalid DOIs), check out the DOI Manager plugin: https://github.com/bwiernik/zotero-shortdoi
  • mmp997
    New Zotero user here. I want to use Zotero not so much for its citation capabilities, as for its file ordering during research. My habit is for any subject category, to label the articles in order of subjective importance 1,2,3.... etc Labelling an article as "1" means it is the most helpful article in that category. So I would like to add an extra column containing these labels, so I can rapidly sort articles by their usefulness (as assessed by me). Is there a plugin which would enable me to do this?
  • emilianoeheyns
    *technically* you could use BBT for this, but it's a pretty heavyweight solution to this problem.
  • warguelles
    or you can also assign tags to each of those categories... and you can identify them by colors for a quick selection (but not ordering)
  • mmp997
    Yep, alas ordering is essential to the way I work. I've tried colors before and it doesn't really hack it, for me.
  • adamsmith
    You can use a column like Extra for this if you want -- but yeah, I'd really look at colored tags again.
    They don't just assign color labels (or even emojis that'll show up in the center panel, though for some reason the number emojis don't work), you can assign them *much* faster and in bulk using the corresponding number keys and, importantly while you can not sort, you *can* filter by tags.
  • mmp997
    It is more complicated than I thought. Even if I had an extra column where I could insert my numbers, the numbers would have to be tied to that particular category. To illustrate: I research aspects of high rise buildings. So an article which is No 1 in value in the "depression" category (its research is very good on the correlation between building height and depressive effects on nearby residents), might well be No 5 in the "cost" category (its discussion of building costs is just not very interesting).
  • adamsmith
    Yeah, sorry, I don't think there's any reasonable way of doing that. Zotero doesn't have any context-depended item labels, fields, or properties.

    The only way to even do this at all would be to actually duplicate the items, and that's a terrible idea on many levels.
  • mmp997
    Quite frustrating. For a web site dealing with tall buildings, I'd like to use Zotero as the engine powering a large set of references to different aspects of high rises. The references would be sorted into multiple categories. In each category the references would ordered by subjective importance, as I see it. It seems this is not possible. Ambition runs ahead of capacity!
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