“Related Items” is almost useful

Calorion · 2024-12-19T03:49:11+00:00

I use Related Items pretty much exclusively for “This paper references that paper” or the like. But relations have no directionality, so there’s no way to tell, without opening the paper and digging through the references, which one references which. I’d like “types” of relations, where we can click on a widget and maybe cycle through different possibilities.

tim820 · 2024-12-19T05:14:42+00:00

The Reference plugin has that directionality. It extracts a paper's reference list. And shows you which cited papers you already have in your library (by DOI search). The early Zotero v7-compatible updates to the plugin also showed you papers that cite the current paper (by Semantic Scholar lookup); but the current status of that functionality is not entirely clear. The transition to Zotero v7 resulted in a lot of changes to the plugin, many cosmetic. And updated documentation is currently sparse on all that (and mostly in Chinese, although Chrome's in-built translation works quite well). So you learn how it works mostly by using it. It's worth the effort.
https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference
https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference/issues/305

With that sort of functionality, the Related tab becomes less relevant. It has always been inherently somewhat ambiguous. The entries one adds might be mainly cited papers, but can be varied - important cited works, other works by the same authors, other related works, etc. With no way to signify why you added each item.

At some point I would expect the Reference plugin-like citation functionality to be added to stock Zotero, such is the importance of citation tracking (and the increasing ways for Zotero to do it, from online repositories). At that point the Related tab could be more clearly defined as just for non-cited/non-citing papers.

Calorion · 2024-12-19T05:44:45+00:00

Thanks, I’ll check it out.

Calorion · 2024-12-19T19:45:14+00:00

Okay, but you can’t set your own reference chains with this, correct?

Calorion · 2024-12-22T19:05:36+00:00

Because if you could, that would be amazing. But I can’t see how.

tim820 · 2024-12-23T05:05:15+00:00

The ethereal style plugin has a graph view that will show the Relations chain you have created.
https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-style#graph-view

The Reference plugin does list - for a single paper - the one-to-many (cited) and many-to-one relations (cited by). Displaying the chain of citations beyond that - to/from other papers beyond one step away - would require network analysis tools ... standalone apps like VOSviewer that can use exported Zotero metadata, or some web-based apps. They can graph the full pattern of citations across all those stemming from/to a given paper, by querying various online citation repositories.
http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2024/06/all-about-citation-chasing-and-tools.html