Copy tags from one to many articles

Often times, I am on spree to bookmark multiple articles in a few minutes, e.g., while reading a review article or (now) watching annual meeting presentations like in AACR. It would be nice to have a feature where I can assign a collection of tags for a one article and then clone those tags across other articles. I understand that I can make a custom folder but I find it inefficient as I can end up with too many custom folders and I rather prefer to keep custom folders to minimum that reflect broader topic like theme1, theme2, etc., and use tags to collect my ideas and diverse topics.

Thanks for the feedback, @sbamin. Bulk actions for labels/folders are one of the features currently in the works, so there might be good news on this front soon. In any case I’ve added your suggestions to the topic on our tracker for the team’s reference.

Having this feature would also be of great help for myself.

Currently I am often saving a number of articles in one item that I have tagged in order to avoid having to apply tags to several items. This, though, has the disadvantage, that I loose information that I would otherwise have if I would have saved the articles separately.

SUGGESTION 1: Not familiar with the flexibility of programming the GUI, but one option might be to allow dragging the “Tags” tab of the item that holds the tags that you want to apply to another item to the other item (as listed in the middle column).

SUGGESTION 2: An alternative solution that would be beneficiary in many other regards, too, would be a hierarchical tag structure. E.g. if you have the tag “Queens XYZ Throne Jubilee” and hierarchically below that the tags “2012” and “Windsors”, then the mechanism would automatically apply the two latter tags if the first tag was applied to an item. (A more exact way of thinking about this would be in Venn diagram logic, where “Queens Jubilee” would be a subset of “2012” and “Windsors”.) This will help with the above problem as I once have to put together such an association and then can apply this thought adding one tag to each item that is part of that topic.

P.S.: As noted by others in other forum threads, tagging is very slow at times (taking several seconds for a tag to be accepted). I am running Zotero 3.0.8 in Firefox 13.0.3 and OS Windows XP and have a couple of hundred tags and 10.000+ items in my DB.
You can tag articles with unique labels that help you organize your knowledge base and link related articles together, providing another way for articles that live across multiple categories to be connected. Tags also help customers who are searching your knowledge base find the most relevant results. If a tag matches a search term, articles with that tag will appear higher on the search result page than any articles that do not have the tag. Once a public article is published, the tags will be displayed as a tag cloud in the article footer and selecting a tag display all of the articles that are using it. I can confirm that you understood me correctly. I am aware of the copy option, but it is sub-optimal: If I find data (e.g. an article or paper) on a topic that I have already covered by an existing item in the Zotero database, then I want a new item for the new data including date of retrieval, source and (if available) other meta data. The only part of the previous item I want are the tags. What actually would be misleading when copying the old item (as you suggest) would be that I would have the meta data of the previous item with the data of the new item.

So a solution along the lines of my above suggestions (with a preference to the latter) would be the way forward in my view.

Concerning the issue of hierarchical tags I am happy to discuss in depth and work with someone conceptually.I think an option to copy tags between items would make sense. I can’t speak to the ease of implementing it, but would be surprised if it were terribly hard.

Hierarchical tags have been requested elsewhere and would be a lot of work to implement - and there are, of course, already hierarchical collections which are conceptually the same as tags - so I don’t see that happening any time soon unless someone wants to work on the actually coding of this.

As for speed - I can’t say anything about the performance issues per se, but note that in the next major release of orange connex tracking number you will be able to input tags (and authors) by newline-separated lists, so if you have a lot of tags for one item you could type a list in notepad and import it in one operation.

If using tags in an internal article, you can find related articles by searching for the tag in the internal knowledge base.

1 Like