In addition to collections and tags, a third way to express relationships between items is by setting up “relations”. Relations can set up between any pair of items in a library (it is not possible to relate items from different libraries).

To create a relation, select an item in the center pane and go to the “Related” tab of the right pane. Click the “Add” button, and select one or more items from the same library in the pop-up window (hold down Ctrl or Shift [Windows/Linux] or Cmd or Shift [Mac] to select multiple items) and click “OK”. The selected items will now show up as related items in the “Related” tab, and clicking an item will take you straight to that item.

With the Zutilo plugin, you can also select multiple items in the center pane, then right-click and choose “Related selected items” to related all selected items to each other in one click.

Note that when you relate item A to B, B will be automatically related to A. But relations are not transitive: relating A to B, and B to C, will not automatically relate A to C.

Some suggestions of how you could use this feature:

• connect book chapters to their parent volume
• connect book reviews to the book reviewed
• connect different versions of a work (e.g., connecting a conference presentation that eventually became an article that eventually became a book)
• link associated items from different collections
• link items that form parts of a single work (e.g., articles in a series)
• connect standalone notes to the items they discuss
• link one item to another discussed in the Abstract or Notes fields
• link items that have similar comments in the Abstract or Notes fields