Feature Request: Lists (of Authors/Journals/Institutions)

SBolz · January 29, 2024

I used to use Citavi before switching to Zotero.
One feature I really miss is the possibility to manage lists. What you can do is to have a list of all author entries and edit those entries, leading to changes in any object with that entry. E.g. you have two journal articles by author Jane Doe. In one article the author is J. Doe, in the other Jane Doe. The list then accordingly contains two entries. You can now edit the list to only have Jane Doe as an author and all the Zotero objects are updated so it's now Jane Doe everywhere without the need to check each article for the writing.

I'm also happy about suggestions for add-ons or workarounds regarding that!

mark_hackney · January 29, 2024

Speaking from experience, I also miss that feature from Citavi. Endnote also has the ability to create lists of journals, authors, or publishers, but these do not automatically update in all the references.
It's such a pity that Citavi seems to be so low down on the developer's list of priorities after they merged with the NVivo developers. Even the Citavi forums are absolutely useless now and all new posts to the forums just get inundated with spam replies.

FeralFlora · January 29, 2024

This would be a great feature to have. This Linter addon is sort of adjacent to what you are looking for, but it's not quite there. Perhaps it could get there with some feature requests. But in any case, this would be a great native feature.

https://github.com/northword/zotero-format-metadata

sdflewrit783 · January 31, 2024

I support the idea of lists, as well as a more strategic effort to make the management of large libraries and multiple groups easier. E.g., if the lists do not work across groups as the search does not, they will not be useful here.

tim820 · February 1, 2024

Simple lists of authors, journals, and tags in a library or collection (with counts if included) are available via code snippets run under Tools\Developer\Run Javascript. Examples linked below. While the resulting lists are not edit-able to modify the items they come from, the lists do often point you to things that might need cleaning up in your library, such as the same journal stored with different spellings, mis-spelled or redundant tags, or the same author stored in different ways (counts also help identify prolific but previously unnoticed authors). Lists of anything else could be generated with a bit of coding work (I learnt from the examples provided by the devs, and learning a little about how the sqlite database is structured). Those code snippets cannot currently be saved within Zotero for re-use, but apparently that is planned ...
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/101754/is-there-a-way-to-run-predefined-javascript-snippets-in-zotero

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/97395/is-there-any-way-to-get-a-list-of-current-tags
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/109084/export-all-author-names-from-a-folder
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/77225/to-extract-journals-names-from-the-library
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/105186/fixing-author-names-and-initials
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/77813/get-a-count-of-authors-in-your-library

adamsmith · February 1, 2024

edit: I think editable lists -- specifically the ability to merge elements, most importantly authors -- would be massively useful for maintaining good metadata in large libraries, yes.

migugg · February 1, 2024

agreed, but journal names and places are just as important. They do not mess up a bibliography like author names do, but they are probably more likely to occur. I think in my library I must have approximately 50 different place versions for MIT Press/Harvard, such as: "Cambridge", "Cambridge Mass.", "Cambridge, Massachusets", "Cambridge Massachusets" "Cambridge - Mass" etc.

mark_hackney · February 1, 2024

@migugg - I can sympathise! I've just gone through my Zotero records for my personal library to try to standardise the publisher and place names.
Editable lists are invaluable. It just makes sense when dealing with large databases to reduce the chances of making a spelling mistake in the name of an author that is used multiple times.