Batch Editing Item Type?

altugkoc
Hello,

First of all, Zotero 10 is amazing! I’m incredibly grateful for this exceptional software, which has made my academic life easier since Zotero 5! I wish I had discovered it earlier.

And about last update... I’ve looked through similar topics on the forum, but I couldn’t find an answer. Sorry if I've missed anything. From what I understand from the update notes, "Batch Editing" currently doesn’t cover fields such as Author/Creator and Tags. Hope it does in future but what about "Item Type"? Did I simply miss the option, or is it also not possible to change the Item Type in bulk?

In my existing library, I have quite a few chapters and articles that were previously added as “Documents.” It would be really useful to be able to change their Item Type in bulk.

Thanks,
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    Sorry, item type also can't currently be changed in bulk. I've added that to the blog post.
  • altugkoc
    edited yesterday at 3:47pm
    Thank you very much for the answer. I hope bulk editing support for all of these fields will be added in the future.

    For those looking for a solution to this issue, I found a temporary but useful workaround: Zutilo (https://github.com/wshanks/Zutilo)

    Once you add Zutilo to Zotero, you can use the “Copy Item Fields” and “Paste Item Type” options in the item menu to change the item type in bulk. For example, open the menu of a book section and select "Copy Item Fields.” Then select as many items of different types as you want and choose “Paste Item Type.” Now they will all be changed to “Book Section.”

    **WARNING:** Be careful when using “Paste Item Type.” If you accidentally click an option such as “Paste All,” you may end up with dozens of duplicate records. To prevent that you can hide any features you don’t use from Zutilo’s settings.

  • dstillman Zotero Team
    To be clear, the reason this isn't straightforward is that item types have different fields, so a naive replacement would wipe out fields. When you manually switch item types, Zotero warns you what fields will be removed.

    An option here — and for the manual switch — might be to move unsupported fields into Extra, but that's a bit of a hack.
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