[New feature] Authors as pages with relations to each of their papers

[3rdCore]

I'm currently building a nice workflow to review papers and keep track of the latest improvements in my field of research. To this end, I installed your incredible plug-in and I must admit that it works really well !

However, I rapidly got to the point where I would need to keep track of the differents authors' papers with dedicated author page. Such a feature seems to be pretty straight-forward to implement in Notero (Or maybe I miss something), but would require to set a second DB for authors, and would be more computationally demanding.

I was wondering if you already thought about this feature, and if so why you never implemented it, is it too specific ?

[dvanoni]

Hi @3rdCore, thanks for the feature request!

I do like this idea and have thought about it a bit before. The main reason why it hasn't been implemented yet is simply because I only have so much time. 😅 There are a number of features that have been requested, and I've been trying to make my way through them based on the amount of interest they receive.

Some of the other feature requests involve customizing database properties and supporting multiple databases and workspaces, so I'd like to spend some time thinking through the best way for this feature to fit alongside those others.

It will likely be a while before I'm able to get to this request, but a related one that I'll probably be picking up sooner is #146. Would having the authors property be multi-select instead of text help with your workflow?

[3rdCore]

Hooo ok I see, what language do you use to communicate between Zotero and Notion Api ? I'd be happy to contribute if you think I could become hands-on on this pretty quickly. I had some previous experience in software architecture, I'd love to provide my expertise :) !

Indeed multi-select could provide a quick way to order papers per author which is a cool feature. But don't think will be scalable for 100+ papers Database tbh, not even considering authors' name doublons as it will create a substantial amount of label to navigate through in the multi-select panel. Once created, it might not be the easiest way to search for a particular author's bibliography.

Considering we have two DB, one for Authors, one for Papers. Let's say I just added a new single author's paper in Zotero, I'm wondering to what extent is it hard to find one entry of a given database on Notion (for instance, to find the related author in the hypothetical Authors DB) and add to it new Relation to the newly added paper. Could you give me your insight on this ?

[3rdCore]

Another cool feature would be to automatically identify for a given paper in the Zotero library, all the cited papers that are also in the Zotero library, so that we could automatically created a graph of references in the papers DB linking papers with their citations.

[dvanoni]

Hooo ok I see, what language do you use to communicate between Zotero and Notion Api ? I'd be happy to contribute if you think I could become hands-on on this pretty quickly. I had some previous experience in software architecture, I'd love to provide my expertise :) !

The code is written in TypeScript. Working with the Notion API is fairly straightforward using their SDK. The trickier part is working with Zotero. It's built on Firefox and doesn't really have documentation of its API, so figuring out how to work with it requires reading through the source and experimenting in Zotero itself. But ultimately, it's all just TypeScript/JavaScript. Feel free to have a look through the Notero code and let me know if you'd like to contribute!

Considering we have two DB, one for Authors, one for Papers. Let's say I just added a new single author's paper in Zotero, I'm wondering to what extent is it hard to find one entry of a given database on Notion (for instance, to find the related author in the hypothetical Authors DB) and add to it new Relation to the newly added paper. Could you give me your insight on this ?

I think this could be achieved through a query on the Authors DB. If a matching page is found, we should be able to set that page ID in the relation property. A possible challenge I foresee here is accommodating the different formats that author names may appear as. I imagine there could be slight mismatches that would result in duplicate pages being created in the Authors DB, but I suppose that could ultimately help users clean up their author data in Zotero.

Another cool feature would be to automatically identify for a given paper in the Zotero library, all the cited papers that are also in the Zotero library, so that we could automatically created a graph of references in the papers DB linking papers with their citations.

This would be really neat! I don't currently know of a way to extract cited papers from a given paper. Do you happen to know a way to do this in Zotero? Is there another plugin that can help with this?