I like having my Zotero library tidy and ordered, which means having proper tags for each item that I import, but I was missing an option to quickly list those items without tags.
If you have plenty of items in your Zotero library, and you need to find those that don’t have at least one tag associated with them, follow these steps:
- Right-click over “My Library” at the top-left of the navigation tree.
- Select “New Saved Search”
- Fill the options as shown in the image below:
- Name: Untagged (or any name you’d like)
- Search in library: My Library
- Match “all” of the following:
- “Tag”
- “does not contain”
- Empty field
- Click OK
The logic is a bit weird: “all items that don’t contain any tag” does the trick, but in my head that phrase sounds like “all items that contain some tag” (you know, negation of a negation is an affirmation) which would mean that the list should show exactly the opposite… anyway.
I hate negative logic, really. It’s like those checkboxes that read “Disable” instead of “Enable” and you have to think twice before clicking or not.