Upgrade StorageFeature request: Citation manager plugin for people indexing authors with their work as metadata?
I saw the suggestion a while back on Twitter* (and I recently posted on r/Zotero on Reddit) which might be hard to put in words (and pardon my technical sloppiness):
Zotero's "database structure" (or how it interfaces the database), per my non-technical understanding, indexes papers/books/etc. based on their unique identifiers (built-in Zotero IDs, which correspond to unique items in the folders/libraries) and sorts them by citation metadata (paper title, author names, year, etc. + a link to the PDF files).
However, a reciprocal ("transposed") database structure/interface that would give authors unique identifiers (like what I assume Zotero uses under the hood? or Google Scholar profile IDs or ORCID IDs) with their work (i.e., the current Zotero item identifiers) and coauthors (with their unique identifiers) as their metadata is lacking—and the current search functionality cannot do this.
With this in place, it would then be possible (with an extension) to import authors' work from, e.g., Google Scholar, and better understand what people are working on with whom (and later on build a coauthorship network).
Is it too hard to implement? Could it be on Zotero's roadmap (or some nice developer do it)?
Thanks.
* Said Tweet: https://twitter.com/annemscheel/status/1517060807225401345
Zotero's "database structure" (or how it interfaces the database), per my non-technical understanding, indexes papers/books/etc. based on their unique identifiers (built-in Zotero IDs, which correspond to unique items in the folders/libraries) and sorts them by citation metadata (paper title, author names, year, etc. + a link to the PDF files).
However, a reciprocal ("transposed") database structure/interface that would give authors unique identifiers (like what I assume Zotero uses under the hood? or Google Scholar profile IDs or ORCID IDs) with their work (i.e., the current Zotero item identifiers) and coauthors (with their unique identifiers) as their metadata is lacking—and the current search functionality cannot do this.
With this in place, it would then be possible (with an extension) to import authors' work from, e.g., Google Scholar, and better understand what people are working on with whom (and later on build a coauthorship network).
Is it too hard to implement? Could it be on Zotero's roadmap (or some nice developer do it)?
Thanks.
* Said Tweet: https://twitter.com/annemscheel/status/1517060807225401345
This recent thread suggests that your assumption is invalid, authors are only designated by last name, first name, middle initial:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/436143#Comment_436143
Thus your idea feels like an interesting but somewhat complex development. At this point there is no support for author identifiers in the database, so this should be introduced first, and after that some functionality would need to be added to take advantage of the new information.
I've had the same issue (with APA style) as the OP of the other thread had. Based on that, I believe there should be some sort of a unique id (?) associated with "last name + first name + middle initial" triplets.
The transposed database/list would allow easily finding similar/duplicate names ("Immanuel+Kant" and "Imanuel+Kant") and merging them thereafter (similar to how you can select and merge multiple Zotero items and get to choose which entry to keep in the merged item).
Does it sound reasonable (or any better)?