Zotero needs an outliner and/or "Project View"

dahlquis
I have come to rely on Zotero. However, I've been getting somewhat nostalgic for my old high school days in the late 1980's, when writing a paper meant gathering 4x6 inch note cards for relevant sources (or particular quotations), and then putting these cards into a small note card box, and using dividers to keep track of sections of a paper or project.

This physical process took the useful bits from a sea of information and arranged them into linear order, as needed for any written argument or project.

It seems that the need to arrange and collect references related to particular writing projects is a core user need that will not disappear anytime soon.

However, Zotero still lacks a tool for organizing notes and items for particular projects.
I would suggest that Zotero consider allowing users to create "Projects" or "Outlines" (in addition to categories). These could allow users to arrange items and notes into user-created orders and sections as needed for particular projects.
  • dstillman
    Notes are the mechanism we support for this. You can create a standalone note and add citations (items), individual annotations from different documents, and other notes to it. Annotations, annotation comments, and note text become new text that you can drag around at the paragraph level and start turning into a draft. When you're ready, you can insert the note into your word-processor document with active Zotero citations. This is the impetus for many of the new features in Zotero 6.

    When designing the new note editor, we did spend a lot of time thinking about whether a dedicated outline/project view made sense, and we concluded that, given the possibility of working with the same materials on different projects (which is also the reason for Zotero's collection model), it was too confusing to try to pull in those materials in a way where if you changed the original, it would change every "project" where you used them. E.g., if you go back to a PDF and change a highlight slightly, or modify its comment, that shouldn't change all 5 projects where you've incorporated that quote. The ultimate goal is crafting a new document for a given project, and that's what the note workflow supports.

    One thing it doesn't do currently which perhaps it could is keep multi-paragraph inserted notes together, even if they become new editable text. That would let you drag in a note and drag it around as a unit, instead of only at the individual paragraph level.
  • dahlquis
    Thanks, dstillman, for replying to my suggestion that Zotero might benefit from a more robust way to to arrange sources and notes into outlines for writing projects.

    It's interesting that Zotero notes can be used as an outliner, I notice now that there are "handles" for dragging lines in Zotero notes up and down, which would indeed be helpful for outlining. Thanks for pointing this out.

    At the same time, it seems like Zotero notes can't incorporate sub-headings, and do not allow for categories to be expanded or collapsed (apologies if I'm mistaken on this). And the fact that notes are displayed in the right-hand pane of Zotero (rather than the left, under libraries) means that one can't easily inspect an item in Zotero before dragging it into the appropriate section of a project or outline.

    I made this suggestion in the context of a project I am working on myself, but I also work with graduate students in the humanities, often recommending Zotero. However, I notice an increasing number of students moving toward writing and outlining tools that are not very compatible with Zotero (especially Scrivner), especially when working on larger complex projects involving many sources, for which project organization is a challenge (i.e. projects that depart from the usual layout of sections of research papers in the sciences).

    I notice that I can find only one video on YouTube (though perhaps I'm missing others) that demonstrates the process of creating a very simple outline in Zotero notes (this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZTjiSSOsE4 which mentions the topic at 15:40), while there are many instructional videos on outlining with Scrivner, and many about on Zotero's core functions, of course. This may be a reflection the limitations of Zotero in this area.

    In general, I'm very grateful for Zotero and to Zotero's developers, and understand that it might not be be practical (or even a good idea, from a "bloat" perspective) to add project outlining tools to Zotero. I do think there is an unmet user need however, and some users would welcome the addition of more outlining tools in Zotero.

    I agree that using the same notes across multiple projects could sometimes be a problem. To address this perhaps some stand-alone "project notes" (e.g. "My plan for chapter 3") could be created that appear only within a particular project outline.

    At the same time, it may be that a better solution for users will be for outlining/writing tools such as Scrivner to add Zotero support, or for some future version of Word or Google Docs to add improved tools for incorporating sources and notes into project outlines (or "binders" as Scrivner refers project files that combine text, outline and research materials).

    Thanks, in any case, to you and the Zotero developers for considering these issues.
  • dstillman
    it seems like Zotero notes can't incorporate sub-headings
    What do you mean by that? You can of course have multiple levels of headings in Zotero. Click the Aa button or use Markdown input.
    do not allow for categories to be expanded or collapsed (apologies if I'm mistaken on this).
    Not sure what you mean by "categories". But more robust outlining options are planned.
    And the fact that notes are displayed in the right-hand pane of Zotero (rather than the left, under libraries) means that one can't easily inspect an item in Zotero before dragging it into the appropriate section of a project or outline.
    You can open any note in a separate window.
  • dahlquis
    Thanks for this additional information, and sorry if any of my comments weren't quite clear.

    I was glad to learn that Zotero notes can include heading labels such as H1, H2, etc.. This is news to me. One reason I may have missed this is that this function is accessed, as you note, through an "Aa" button; however this button looks like the "Change Case" button from MS Word, and I've rarely if ever tried to apply formatting to Zotero notes.

    In the context of outlining, I was referring to headings as also incorporating the visual indenting of headings as they appear in outlines written on paper, and in outlining tools such as MS Word, LibreOffice, and Scrivner.

    It's great that heading tags can be applied in Zotero notes, but these headings don't really look or behave like the headings that appear in most outlines, in which different sections of text are indented at various distances from the left-hand margin. Still, I agree that heading tags are very important for machine readability and accessibility purposes.

    You mention that Zotero notes can be opened in separate windows. However once opened, such notes cannot be easily dragged into one section or another of an outline that itself has been created (as you suggest) within a Zotero note. It would be nice to be able to drag both notes and items from the right-hand side of the screen into an open "outline" or "project" that would appear (beneath the libraries) in Zotero's left-hand panel.

    I'm delighted to hear that more robust outlining features are planned for Zotero. I will keep an eye our for these (or a roadmap that includes them) in the future. Thanks again for considering this issue.
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