Search citations in account by User Role

This has been tagged as not a support question so you’re probably better off doing a feature request on github, but out of interest, what is the kind of use case you’re envisaging for this?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by Mark.

@codeispoetry Hello, Mark. Unfortunately, I have not found a github for this Zotpress plugin. The publisher encourages questions to happen only on this forum, and I have seen other fearure requests. So I imagine I am requesting on the right place. Please guide me if there is a proper place, as I am happy to contribute to open source.

There is an University research group that presents to the public each one of its published works in individual posts on a WordPress website. As each post is written and revised by the corresponding article or book lead-author, and considering this person needs to replicate all the citations and bibliography used that were previously stored on its Zotero account, then the scientist could intelligently link his Zotero account to WordPress through this Zotpress plugin in order to insert the dynamic content on the Gutenberg editor. Doing this, the benefit of the plugin is revealed, as the scientist do not need to revise the post if a channge/typo in the citation is ever corrected.

Unfortunately, when the scientist links his Zotero account to Zotpress, every WordPress user that can create a post, suddenly can not only access Zotpress, but also search each other scientist’s entire collections, on Gutenberg or on the plugin page. This possibility creates an undesirable privacy concern. Not every researcher knows each other, nor did they want others to access their personal collections.

I believe this request is not trivial, even for WordPress. It opens up conversations about multicollaboration, that I believe is exactly the focus on Gutenberg phase 3. How plugins are going to be served by WordPress to allow the users to manage their data extracted by external APIs? When the user data is inside WordPress, ready to be used in the editor, how does the user adjust the max-lenghth its data is going to be used on features inside the block/text-editor? We can’t rely only on “admin adjusting the setting page”, or “dev limiting search bar by user-role” being the first option. Actually, to certain extent, not even admins should have access to some user-data or permission to change some of its settings. To edit userdata by user-role, to limit or to achieve sharing-scenarios, here in this app, the objeective should be better achieved only as personal decisions, if the user/researcher wants it that way. Being like this, the users are served by privacy control and more usage scenarios with plugins.
As I see, we are just around the corner of scientists collaborating with multi-authors on posts. Soon someone will create some block-patterns that speed it up the post creation associating the user meta-data to a google of sorts.

Every researcher/user needs control over her/his Zotero account on this plugin, on Gutenberg and on WordPress. Help me to thrive this feature request please, if you know how.

Hi both — Not sure why this was set as “not a support question” but it’s a good one to consider. The original idea was that WordPress could bring together different Zotero libraries. Of course there are cases like this where it may not be appropriate for all users to see all accounts. However managing this is a bit tricky.

When someone adds a Zotero account in the plugin, I can easily record the WordPress account that does this and create a relationship there.

Then, the easiest and quickest way to manage access by other WordPress accounts would be to add an option of either “private” or “public” similar to how Zotero currently does it. If private, the library would only be visible to the WordPress user who added it to WordPress, unless a shortcode is used that accesses the library in someway (since I assume one would only sync their Zotero account to WordPress if they want to use their library in some way through shortcodes on their WordPress site).

How does that sound as a first approach? I know it’s not as fine-grained but I have VERY limited time right now. Of course anyone is free to edit the code on WordPress and make a contribution (going through the proper steps to do so).

One reason I asked about a use case is that I had a feeling that this gets largely into the territory of what group libraries were made for. Many of us use group libraries in collaborations to share relevant parts of personal libraries without opening up the whole. The feature request, as I understand it, would almost replicate group library behaviour on the ZotPress side and I wonder whether that is a good use of resources.

From what you describe, your website rarely if ever needs to have access to full personal libraries, as what’s going to be cited is only a small subset directly tied to published works. Therefore I can easily imagine making a shared group library for this project and having scientists that collaborate on this website drop the relevant references that they want to cite into a collection in that group library. That solves the “access to personal library” issue.

Is there a particular reason the group library route wouldn’t work for this project?

I guess the drawback of (Zotero) group libraries for sharing your individual library is that you have to copy/paste those items and keep both sides up-to-date (as far as I know). So in a management sense it’s easier to just sync and share your individual library.

The balance of ease of use and privacy.

Interested to hear @marceloaof’s thoughts.

Greetings,
Katie, I believe your first approach resonates well with the third proposed solution of mine.
I understand on your solution that Zotero accounts currently registered on Zotpress by admin are going to need to be added again to Zotpress, if a Zotero-user is also a WordPress-user and wants to manage access to its collection.
In this case, a “public” default value would be desirable, since it does not interfere in the current plugin usage.
If you are sure this is the best initial implementation for yourself to maintain the code, considering future improvements not requiring to extensively rewrite the foundation, I encourage you to achieve this first approach.

Mark, you are correct, a group library account would have been better for the website. For the website, but unfortunately not to people behind it. Precisely, the balance of ease of use and privacy was the reason for this request. Because if we still need to duplicate citations at any impending change, with a Zotpress solution, the reason why we have searched Zotpress for is insufficient to justify the chosen scope.
In addition, there is a renewed look at privacy that this suggestion creates for Zotpress, that does not seem to replicate a Zotero’s privacy feature, considering Zotero does not allow a granular control on personal collections in face of the public key, from what I understand.