Managing your Zotero library effectively
4 Working with Related Items
The Related Items feature is the third mechanism for organizing Zotero content, and it’s likely the least-used of the three. This feature gives you a way to show that items in your Zotero library are connected in some way. For example, you might relate a book review article to the book being reviewed. In this video, we show you how you can use this feature to create more connections between your Zotero items.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this module you will be able to
- Describe how Related Items differ from Zotero’s tags and collections features
- Create relations between Zotero items
A features used to show that two Zotero items are connected in some way. Related Items appear on the "Related" tab of an individual Zotero entry's information pane. The nature of the relationship can be arbitrary. For example, chapters of the same book; linking a journal article to other articles it mentions; etc.
Unlike tags and collections, you cannot search for related items. This feature is just a nice way for to illustrate connections between Zotero items that are of interest to you.
This term refers to your total Zotero collection: everything you see when you select My Library and your shared libraries in the leftmost pane of your Zotero window.
The term "items" here refers to two things: bibliographic entries that have been added to your Zotero library, and attachments that may be connected with those items (for example: PDF files, web snapshots, images, and notes). This is because many of the things that you can do with bibliographic entries, such as adding tags, can also be done to attachments to entries.
Tags are one of the three features for organizing your Zotero library. A tag is any string of text -- either created by you or imported from a database -- that describes an item in Zotero. T
ags can be subject keywords, geographic or chronological information, workflow/status information, and more. Unlike collections, there is no way to create "sub-tags" for a tag.
All tags are visible in the tag selector, which is in the bottom left area of the Zotero user interface.
Collections are one of the three main features used to organize and maintain your Zotero library.
They are used to logically organize your Zotero entries into "folders" and "sub-folders," and you can set them up using any scheme that works for you. Some people create collections according to topics and sub-topics; others use them to divide material by course or semester.
An Zotero entry can be a member of more than one collection.
