I’ve been sending this request for years. The folders need more levels for proper organization. This is a standard feature that should have been included from the beginning, at least for the desk top version. When a user has thousands of references, one folder level isn’t sufficient, particularly with the complexity involved in research.
Any chance the programmers will ever add this feature?
So you want to be able to nest folders inside folders, is that correct? Endnote doesn’t exactly have just 1 level of organisation, if you create a group set, then essentially the folders inside it are nested - ie. if you click on the name of the group set it shows you all references in all folders within that set.
Then you can also create a new group from 2 or more groups (right click in the folders list then choose Create from Groups). This lets you create a group that will show you just references that are in both groups, all references in both groups or references that are in one folder but not in the other -depending on if you choose AND, OR or NOT as you criteria.
Then there are smart groups…
To me this gives a lot of flexibility, I don’t know what the advantage would be to nest multiple folders…
I completely agree with the OP about this. For me this is the only reason for staying with Mendeley, it would simply be impossible to sort thousands of articles in the way I want in Endnote. It seems this would be the easiest thing in the world to implement, I mean, it’s just the way that every file manager on earth works, no?
@ben_ Please help me with this. I have for example a folder in Mendeley named My research , with everything related to my research (outcome after intensive care). Un this folder, I have subfolders named Outcome , Methodology etc, maybe 10 subfolders. In the Outcome subfolder, I have specific articles regarding specific outcomes sorted in subsubfolders, like Cognition , Return-to-work , Special patient groups etc. Under for example Special patient groups, I have Frail patients , The very old , Homeless etc. I even have subsubsubfolder under these with further filtration.
Nested folders, as far as I understand, can’t create this structure. Tags would be a way to go but I really don’t like the idea of having hundreds of articles in folders and then relying on tags to identify them, I simply like the idea of subfolders in numerous levels because that’s the way I sort everything else on my computer.
I completely agree with this feature request of more folders. I’m thinking of switching to Mendeley because I’m missing this feature in EndNote so long. It would help so much to organize lots of references.
I have 6272 references now. They are ordered in 40 folders with approximately 15 subfolders in each one. Usually I work at the same time with at least 3 to 5 different projects. It is really complicated to work with so many references without the tree structure like organisation (more subfolder levels). The manager is great software, but with more references it starts to be a bit disarrangedand I spent too much time with rolling in the reference list and with the changing of the folder position in reference list…
I can’t believe that this is not a feature yet. Having started with Mendeley as an undergrad and having used nested folder systems everywhere else in computing it is incredibly frustrating to not have this basic feature.
The most frustrating aspect of this for me is that everywhere else where I store things digitally it is within a nested folder system with unlimited sub folder levels to organize. With endnote I am forced to think differently from how I do everything else and it makes everything within endnote more cluttered and awkward to use this one simple feature will put my workflow with endnote into a system that everyone has been using for everything else and although it is arguable, I personally think that it is a better system for organization.
I guess I just don’t think of things in this structured way, but please note - if on a PC, the deeper your folder structure goes, the longer the path+filenames get and you will hit the character limit wall for filenames.
I got around the folder/subfolder issue by using lots of searches based on groups of other smartgroup searches or folders. The main problem here is not really nesting of folders, at least in my view, it is the lack of the ability to create logical constructs/commands to query the database. I am continually frustrated by the inability to ask simple questions. Since there is a limit to the number of questions any one smartgroup can handle, I need to create one s,martgroup that looks for any vowel in a certain field, one smartgroup that looks for whether the record has a certain date and another smartgroup to check exclusions, then I need to create a group that combines those smartgroups in the correct order.
Also Endnote does NOT allow one to copy a group set and then alter it. I track the publications of 150+ investigators, so I have a search for each one. When I want to change the year it is searching for I either have to go into each search and change that parameter or what I did instead was to make groups on groups for each one and when I want to change the date range it searches for I change the daterange search that the group looks at and it changes automatically in each group on groups.
This is not an optimal way of doing things. I use Zotero for other things and the logic there is so much easier. It also is easy to publish to a wordpress blog using Zotero and nearly impossible to do the same using EndNote.