Thanks. I really think adding this ability would make Zotero a killer app for Firefox. Not to mention it would make Endnote, Procite, etc., out of business.

I have discussed for years with colleagues and students the shortcomings of various notetaking packages. Expense, steep-learning curve, complexity overkill, basically have been the most cited complaints. Even the CHNM's Scribe was not used by many people I knew because it was too difficult to figure out and often didn't do very simple tasks well . These basic tasks everyone I've talked with over the years are quite simple and replicate the 3x5 index card system:

1. Easily enter bibliographical info (automatic entery directly from online catalog is obviously best).
2. take notes from each bibliographical entry
3. be able to organize/sort these notes by keyword or subject
4. print these sorted notes, with footnote/endnote references, to form the structure or outline of the manuscript
5. portability to move notes, etc., from machine to machine.

Since Hypercard first came out as standard part of the Mac, I've just created my own databases to do these basics, though all have a lot of problems. That's why it will be great if Zotero can accomplish this eventually.

I would love to have a page number field as well. I'm already in love with Zotero and am confident that it will get better. I can't feel confident that it's the best note-taking app yet. Does Zotero export using a standard that other apps (like Scribe) can understand?

Just finished writing my first paper with Zotero and I was quite happy with the process but I do have some suggestions for the notes section to elaborate on what was posted previously.

A print note option would be most welcome. I wound up cut and pasting the notes I created into a separate Open Office document from the one I was using for my paper and then printing this.

One reason I had to do this is when I was working on a section of my paper I would open all of the notes related to that section in their individual separate windows. One problem -- 17 of my Firefox windows were all labeled "Edit Note" and I couldn't tell one window from the next without actually going into them.

I'll throw out some different suggestions since I know everyone puts a paper together differently:

1)When the notes are opened in a separate window rather than title the window "Edit Note" use some feature that makes them unique. In my case I was using journal articles so the title (or at least a portion since mine were medically related and long at times) could show in the window title.
2)Allow the option of opening notes in tabs (one of the reasons I've been using Firefox). One of the nice things about opening notes in tabs is there are a lot of add-ons which would complement Zotero nicely. For example I use Colorful Tabs to give each of my tabs another color. There's another add-on (I'm not sure which one) which allows "snapshot" views of several open tabs at once (also a feature of IE7). This feature would be really nice for looking at several open notes at one time. In this way you could leaf through them like you do index cards or notes.

Hope this helps! Thanks!

On tags (also authors and other lists maintained by Zotero).

If I mistype a tag, author, etc., it seems to hang round forever. Is there any way of getting rid of a spurious tag? Is there any way of exporting the list of all tags, or all authors, etc?

tags are exported as KW in RIS and I believe notes go in one of the N fields - just try it out.
You can also print notes and tags using the generate report function, which I don't think existed in 2006.

that's why there is a tab on the right - if you have that selected and scroll through the items in the center, you can see if you have tags.
Tags and notes in the center - I don't see that working GUI-wise. What would it be? Just another column with a plus?

Hi guys. I love Zotero, just would love to see more features on the NOTES part:

1. Page number should be a field in the Note. Then, feature to sort by page number the notes.
2. On the Word add-in, I would like a button to add a Note to the TEXT, with the corresponding footnote / endnote added as well. Currently to get a note into the text I need to drag the note from Zotero to the document, then select the insert citation button. Or, you could have an option so that when the citation you are inserting is a Note, the note gets pasted there, plus the footnote / endnote (which automatically reads the page number from the Note).

A lightweight solution to this (which does require some changes in Zotero) may lie in enchanced "Scan" capability. The idea would be to drag and drop a plain text "citation" that contains a Zotero database link into and external document. Just about every tool out there supports simple links, so this would integrate tools like Notational Velocity, Word outline mode or the Emacs org-mode outliner into a Zotero workflow, without major changes to Zotero itself.

Since the links would identify Zotero references unambiguously, it would be relatively easy to convert them into Zotero citations when the external notes are later assembled into a word processor document. I recently posted some ideas about how this might work here, and a couple of us are quite excited about the possibilities it opens up.

This is still some distance away from implementation in Zotero, but it does seem like a promising approach that would address this issue.