Upgrade StorageFeature Request: Hierachal Outlining and Assigning Notes/Annotations
Hello! I'm new to Zotero and this community, coming from Citavi.
One feature I haven't been able to replicate in Zotero, or find discussion about in these forums (on a cursory search), is the ability to create hierarchal outlines and assign notes/annotations. Effectively, this is the "Knowledge Organizer" in Citavi: you create basic categories and subcategories (effectively planning and outlining the paper), then annotations can be individually assigned to each category/subcategory. In the word processor, the same interface is presented (annotations in the same hierarchal system), to efficiently write and cite. In example:
https://www1.citavi.com/sub/manual6/en/index.html?101_creating_categories.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfMaBlGBvIw
In my experience, it's the most seamless method of efficiently reading, annotating, outlining, and writing. While I'm still exploring Zotero, it seems the building blocks are mostly there - a built-in PDF reader to annotate and extract text/images as notes, an organization system, and a plugin for word processors - it's just lacking this direct interface of creating outlines and assigning individual annotations to headings and subheadings within the outline, then using that same organization to cite in the word processor
If I'm wrong, where this functionality already exists and I somehow haven't found it, I would greatly appreciate being pointed in the right direction!
One feature I haven't been able to replicate in Zotero, or find discussion about in these forums (on a cursory search), is the ability to create hierarchal outlines and assign notes/annotations. Effectively, this is the "Knowledge Organizer" in Citavi: you create basic categories and subcategories (effectively planning and outlining the paper), then annotations can be individually assigned to each category/subcategory. In the word processor, the same interface is presented (annotations in the same hierarchal system), to efficiently write and cite. In example:
https://www1.citavi.com/sub/manual6/en/index.html?101_creating_categories.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfMaBlGBvIw
In my experience, it's the most seamless method of efficiently reading, annotating, outlining, and writing. While I'm still exploring Zotero, it seems the building blocks are mostly there - a built-in PDF reader to annotate and extract text/images as notes, an organization system, and a plugin for word processors - it's just lacking this direct interface of creating outlines and assigning individual annotations to headings and subheadings within the outline, then using that same organization to cite in the word processor
If I'm wrong, where this functionality already exists and I somehow haven't found it, I would greatly appreciate being pointed in the right direction!
Unfortunately I'm still stuck with Citavi because of this, 3 years later...
"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. "
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/466168#Comment_466168