 Welcome to our module on Working with Related Items in Zotero. It's one of the five modules in our unit on managing Zotero collections. In this module, we're going to cover the following topics, where to find related items, how to relate items together, and some ideas for how to use related items in your Zotero library. To follow along in this module, you need to have Zotero installed on your computer. You can get the software at Zotero.org. And for more information on the basics of using Zotero, see our online guide or check out the mastering Zotero guide on GitHub. This module also uses some examples from a sample Zotero library. You can, of course, use your own Zotero library to try out the features I cover here, but I've also made the sample items for this course available for you to import into your Zotero library. That way you can see exactly what I see and follow along click by click. To learn how to get and import the sample items, see the course setup module and come back to this one when you're ready. The related items feature is another option you can use in Zotero to help organize your content. Now, I'll say up front that this feature is much more rarely used than collections or tags, since collections and tags are also a way of collecting and grouping items in your library to show that they're related to one another. So you can actually have an immaculate Zotero library without ever using related items, but related items can be helpful in certain situations, so I'm going to cover it. Related items is pretty much what it sounds like, a way of indicating that two items in Zotero are connected somehow. Like tags, related items are shown in the item information for any item you have selected in your Zotero library. For library items, like this item for a YouTube interview with Miriam Taves, Canadian author, they're on the related items tab in the info pane. Like tags, you can also list related items on attachments, PDF files, web snapshots, images, notes, etc. For most of these, you'll see that tags are listed at the top of the item panel when you select them, but for notes, however, because there's areas for text, you'll see them at the bottom. Regardless of where you see these related items listed, they all work the same way. Here's how it works. I have a book item in my library for a discussion companion for Miriam Taves a complicated kindness, which is one of her novels. So I want to keep track of the fact that this item is related to the actual book, so it's a book for book clubs that's about the book that Miriam Taves wrote, so I want to keep it connected. So what I'm going to do is with the item selected, I'm going to go to the related tab and click add. I'll get a pop-up window that I can use to browse for another item. Or alternately, I can use the search field at the top and type some text to narrow down the list of available options by keyword or tag. So I'm gonna select my library and in the search bar, I'll write complicated to find the book item that I want. Now I found it here. It's the book of complicated kindness. I'm gonna select it. You can choose more than one item if you want, and then click OK. And now the two items are related, and they show up in the related items pane. That's basically how it works. So the bigger question maybe is, why would you use this? After all, it's pretty easy to argue that using tags and collections is a perfectly fine way to not only show that items are related by being in the same collection or sharing a common tag, but actually show that items are related in a specific way. After all, related items just tells you that two items are connected somehow, but it doesn't tell you how. I can think of some examples where this feature might be useful though. And this is not a complete list. These are just the things that I thought of. So the first one is, if I have different entries for chapters of a book, I can use related items to link them all together. Or if I have a book entry and then a set of book section entries that are related to that book, I can show that the sections all belong to one book. Second example is, let's say I'm writing a paper on a recent novel for a literature class. In addition to reading the book, which I can view as my primary source, I've also decided to take a look at a number of reviews of the book that were written in literary magazines. Now the reviews of the book would be secondary sources and I could use related items to connect the reviews of the book to the book itself. Another example, let's say I found a pre-print version of a scientific paper, meaning a version that was posted online before it was actually peer reviewed, and I added it to my library. And then I also found the peer reviewed final version of the article, which was published in a formal journal. For some reason I've decided I want to keep both versions, maybe there are changes between the two that I want to make sure I keep track of, so I'm going to use the related items to show that they're connected. I might also do the same sort of thing if I have entries for multiple editions of the same book, for example. And lastly, let's say I'm making notes related to an article. And as I'm writing down my thoughts in my little note document, I realize that I'm actually making reference to something else that I've read. I can add a related item to my notes and link it to the other source that I referenced. Unlike tags and collections, you can't search Zotero for related items. You'll see them in the interface, and also maybe if you generate a report for an item that has related items because the report will list those, but that's about it. So basically they're just a really nice way to remind you that certain things in your library are connected somehow. It's just another little tool in the Zotero toolbox. At this point, we've covered working with collections, tags and related items. And you're probably feeling pretty comfortable with Zotero, which is great. Now in the last module of this unit, we're going to crank that up to 11 with a terrific add-on called Zotilo, which will start putting you into Zotero power user mode. See you there.