Tags - what could be improved

Proper
1. Show all items that have not been tagged
I would find it very useful to see all items that have not yet been tagged. This is useful because then I can see which items I still have not looked at or maybe just forgot to tag. AFAIK this can not yet been done by a search.

2. Inverse the viewed Items
I would appreciate, if there was a small checkbox or button in the Tag Selector to inverse the results. For example if you first want to see al items tagged "todo" and then want to view all items that do not have the tag "todo", you would simply check the above mentioned checkbox/button. Sure, you could also just do a search on all items which do not have this tag, but I think it would be more convenient to have a small checkbox/button.
  • dsuisman
    I'd really love an easier way to *manage* tags en masse.

    Example: I import a bunch of items from some online library catalogs. Zotero adds some LC tags to go with those records. Fine: sometimes this is very helpful. Every so often, though, I need to go through my tags to weed out the many useless or redundant tags that have appeared (e.g. "United States" is not a helpful tag for me, and "Thomas Alva Edison" gets the abbreviated tag "TAE" in my collection). If it were possible to delete and rename tags more expeditiously, it would make the use of tags much easier for me.
  • dstillman
    edited June 10, 2007
    dsuisman: You can delete and rename tags globally (across all items) by right-clicking on them in the tag selector. I'll create a ticket to be able to remove tags from particular items by holding down a modifier key while dragging them to the tags in the tag selector (the same way that you can assign them en masse without a modifier key), as well as for the things that Proper suggests.
  • dsuisman
    Dan,
    Thanks for the follow-up. I know about right-clicking to modify individual tags. What I was thinking of was something easier for managing lots of tags at once, i.e. not having to confirm deletion of each tag each time and not having to mouse all over the place. What I was thinking of might be a list of all tags with check boxes beside each tag and you could check to delete more than one tag at once. And maybe their would be a blank field next to each tag so that you could rename multiple tags at a shot too.

    Here's one more issue I just noticed, an alphabetization problem. In the tag box, capitalized words are alphabetized and listed before lower-case words that begin with the same letter, e.g. "Musicians" appears before "mechanical music."

    Thanks,
    David
  • padilla12
    edited June 12, 2007
    What I was thinking of might be a list of all tags with check boxes beside each tag and you could check to delete more than one tag at once. And maybe their would be a blank field next to each tag so that you could rename multiple tags at a shot too.
    Yes-I enthusiastically echo these two suggestions.

    Cordially,
    Victor Padilla
  • dstillman
    edited June 12, 2007
    Thanks for the suggestions—we'll see what we can do.

    dsuisman: The sorting issue should have been fixed in 1.0.0b4.r3, released on April 28th. Be sure you're running the latest version of Zotero, available from the front page.
  • dsuisman
    Dan,
    You mean 1.0.0b4.r5, don't you? That's what I'm running, and that's the version the changelog says was released on 4/29.
    Alas, it looks like this sorting problem wasn't completely fixed.
  • dstillman
    1.0.0b4.r5 is the latest, but 1.0.0b4.r3 from the 28th fixed most issues with sorting ("Improved sorting app-wide to use locale-specific collation sort"). Looks like it didn't fix case sorting in tags and collections, though.

    Anyhow, I've fixed the problem on the dev branch. Thanks.
  • josalegal
    edited June 22, 2007
    -Tag Cloud

    I think it could be very usefull to have a tag cloud (more common tags bigger, or first) I have hundreds of tags (most of them imported from ieee) and it has make totally unusable the tag browser, maybe using a tag cloud you can see better the more important tags (or at least the most used :)

    Another improvement could be that zotero automatically adds/remove a tag that refers to the folders where the documents lives

    i.e: Document: "USB tutorial" can be under "/computer/comunications" folder and at the same time under the "/microcontroller/comunication" and tagging it automatically is like "relating" with that folders in an automatic way

    thanks
  • verbunk
    edited July 10, 2007
    Hi Guys,

    If possible, I'd like to see the related tab automatically populate from files that are tagged similiarly. (identically I guess). Going along with this it would be nice to have the tags queried in google sets to build tag suggestions and use that to link similar papers if the tags are not identical.

    Some other goodies could be, sending the tags be to google trends (find latest stuff being talked about on that tag) and google related links to suggest stuff build your library (with the obligatory links to google scholar ;) )

    And no, I don't work at google. I just exploit their free and awesome searching tools on a daily basis. :D

    -J
  • treetag
    Hello team,

    I wish there was an option to include the tags in reports. I attach a lot of notes to my citations and it would make it easier for me to scan the reports. (This relates to the lack of functionality in notes: I'd like to be able to specify commentary versus excerpt, page number and perhaps and optional note title with the note. I think these have been requested by others and are in the pipeline. Currently I use the tags to help me sort through the notes while browsing through my library).
  • analogAI
    I think inverse selection (negative selection) would be very useful.

    Instead of an "inverse" checkbox, exclusion can/should be done on a per tag basis. Possible implementation would be click select a tag while holding down shift, to "exclude" articles having a particular tag.

    An example usage of would be something like:
    1. select all citations tagged with "Shakespeare"
    click on Shakespeare tag
    tags highlighted in blue would be "Shakespeare"
    remaining tags available shown would be Hamlet, Teaching, Read, Tragedy, Comedy
    2. I do not want any tragedy references so "exclude select" all tragedy
    shift+select click on "Tragedy" tag
    tags highlighted in blue would be "Shakespeare"
    tags highlighted in red would be "Tragedy"
    Zotero would list all citations that are tagged with "Shakespeare" but not tagged with "Tragedy"
  • scot
    Not to dispute the usefulness of your suggestion (on which it would be interested to hear what others have to say), but do you know that you can do those searches you describe (If I understand them correctly) very neatly using the advanced search dialog? It's not quite as quick as you describe, but it's not much more work either.
  • dstillman
    Instead of an "inverse" checkbox, exclusion can/should be done on a per tag basis. Possible implementation would be click select a tag while holding down shift, to "exclude" articles having a particular tag.
    Seems reasonable to me. I don't know if Shift is the right key—while it makes logical sense in that it is essentially shifting the action, given what Shift normally does in multiple selection it feels a bit off. Ctrl/Cmd don't make much more logical sense but at least feel more appropriate (to me, at least) for a single-item action.

    I'll update the inverse checkbox ticket to make this work on a per-tag basis.
  • kwsherwood
    An additional tag management function that I think many would find useful -- the ability to select multiple items and then mass tag them.
  • dstillman
    An additional tag management function that I think many would find useful -- the ability to select multiple items and then mass tag them.
    http://www.zotero.org/documentation/getting_the_most_out_of_tags
  • lord_asriel
    edited November 10, 2007
    I think it would be very useful to have:
    - first the possibility to set lists of tags to be treated as synonyms because I find extremely boring to rename everything by hand. For example I have autotagging enabled and when I download a paper sometimes keywords are capitalized, sometime not; sometimes acronym are used etc..
    - second the possibility to color code tags. As far as I know automatically inserted one are orange, the others blue.. but as soon you modify the orange one (even if you just capitalize a letter) the color changes to blue and there is no way to revert it to orange.
  • Phonologist
    I'm interested to know the outcome of the "inverse tag" idea. Is it possible to generate a list of entries which are "Tag A BUT NOT Tag B"?
  • adamsmith
    Advanced search, match all
    Tag is A
    Tag is not B
  • Phonologist
    edited August 24, 2011
    Hi again. I've been trying this and it doesn't work, because each advanced search starts with all items. So search B does not filter search A - it is new search and gives "not B" out of the total list. I've tried selecting all the Search A items first but this makes no difference.
  • alinghi
    "dsuisman Jun 10th 2007
    I'd really love an easier way to *manage* tags en masse.

    Example: I import a bunch of items from some online library catalogs. Zotero adds some LC tags to go with those records. Fine: sometimes this is very helpful. Every so often, though, I need to go through my tags to weed out the many useless or redundant tags that have appeared (e.g. "United States" is not a helpful tag for me, and "Thomas Alva Edison" gets the abbreviated tag "TAE" in my collection). If it were possible to delete and rename tags more expeditiously, it would make the use of tags much easier for me."
    -----

    Three years later, can we do ? You can put a tag on multiple items ?

    Thank
  • mark
    Yes you can put a tag on multiple items. Select the items, make sure the tag pane is visible, drag the items onto the tag. Not sure though what become of the other features discussed here.
  • alinghi
    Thank !!
  • macho
    I'd love automatic tag suggestions. Have Zotero search the body of the html/pdf/etc. for substrings that match any existing tag and either just automatically add those tags, or include a really easy way to add them (checkboxes, eg.) This could be turned off in preferences for those who find it annoying.

    I'd also like some way of managing tags (hierarchies where you can mark one tag as a child of another parent tag, eg.) but auto-suggesting would be much preferred to this request.
  • hamed_fcs
    The Idea of feature or characteristics mass editing could contain most fields for the items, like publisher, publication, language, author which is the most important because in time multiple names for same author appear
    for author specifically I suggested the ability to ad brief bio could contain the multi form of his name
    I prefer this feature to zotero to be like query builder, it build query to retrieve the item and change them and will be registered inside zotero database if it's repeated like the names as maintenance procedure someone could from time to time requested it in this case the procedure could create the bio section as a note or as section added to the item abstract, or which I prefer just link to the field inside specific column in the maintenance section added to the database this will preserve size from repeated bio to be added to every item
  • hamed_fcs
    other second most important field needs multiple choices is the link, most item has many link to be retrieved from them, and link could became obsolete and need replace
  • kateschneider
    desired function: merge tags (e.g., duplicate tags that differ only in capitalization) by drag and dropping one tag to change onto the one that is spelled as it should be changed to.
  • tomgoodell
    @kateschneider—Great suggestion! I would love to see the ability to automatically merge duplicate tags that differ only in capitalization.
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