Exclude a specific indexed subfolder from "Mentions" and AI analysis?

DEVONthink
1

Hi everyone,

I am using DEVONthink exclusively with indexed files (no imports).

I have a large “Parent” folder indexed in my database. Inside this parent folder, there are some specific subfolders that I want to keep indexed, but I want to exclude them completely from the AI analysis features, specifically the “Mentions” section in the Inspector.

I have already tried using the “Exclude from…” settings (Classification, See Also, Search, Tagging, and Wiki Linking), but those files still appear in the “Mentions” list in the Inspector.

Is there any way to tell DEVONthink to ignore a specific subfolder for Mentions and AI without moving it out of the indexed parent folder in Finder?

If this is not possible, what is the best workflow to keep these files indexed but isolated from the AI features of my main database?

Thanks in advance for your help.

MacBook Pro 16″, M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, macOS Tahoe 26.3.1
DEVONthink 4.2.2

2

Mentions are not based on AI. Do you just want to get less, more focused mentions?

3

Are you actively using mentions?

4

Actually, it’s not based on less or more focused mentions, but on the folders I want to focus on and the folders I want to exclude from the search, regardless of the number of results retrieved.

Thank you very much for your attention.

5

Yes, I do. I’m a writer and researcher in Philosophy, and mentions give me the ability to dive into my big library for a term that I am concerned with.

Thank you so much.

6

And you’re aware mentions only apply to the name or aliases of a document? It doesn’t serve the same function as the Concordance.

7

Thank you for the explanation. I understand how the Concordance works, but it feels too statistical and complex for my daily research.

I prefer using Mentions because of the ‘Occurrences’ view. It is much faster and shows me the context of the term inside the document immediately, without the many steps required by the Concordance. For a researcher with a large library, Mentions is the best way to connect titles to their actual content.

My goal is not to replace the Concordance. I just want to find a way to clean up the ‘noise’ in the Mentions feature so I can focus on the specific files relevant to my project, without seeing results from folders I don’t need.