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Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

zotero.org

21–30 of 168 posts

Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

#21

Zotero really need more advertisement. I prefer Zotero over Mendeley, but Mandaley seems to advertise much more to university.

Mendeley was very popular (until its unfortunate acquisition) because of its excellent PDF full text search and the ability to automatically get metadata (i.e. a bibtex entry) from PDFs. Can Zotero do that?

Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

#22

Does it only store the metadata or does it have the power to store the full text, whether pdf or website or other document? Could you use this like a digital "commonplace book"?

You can store pdfs and other article files, and sync them across devices. The first 300MB are free, and there are 2GB, 6GB, and unlimited-storage paying tiers.

Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

#23

Does it only store the metadata or does it have the power to store the full text, whether pdf or website or other document? Could you use this like a digital "commonplace book"?

You can store pdfs and other article files, and sync them across devices. The first 300MB are free, and there are 2GB, 6GB, and unlimited-storage paying tiers.

You can also just set up a WebDAV server and sync that across devices. Works pretty damn well.

Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

#24

Does it only store the metadata or does it have the power to store the full text, whether pdf or website or other document? Could you use this like a digital "commonplace book"?

It allows you to upload PDF or website snapshots, and by default an account is granted 300 MB free storage. They also have paid upgrades:

2 GB: $20/yr 6 GB: $60/yr Unlimited: $120/yr

I've had the paid 2 GB plan for a while, I've got about 800 MB stored with them, and I've been very happy with the service.

Between the Firefox connector, the automated PDF OCR metadata lookup, and the ability to pull in metadata from DOIs, Zotero makes indexing things insanely easy. It's like MusicBrainz for articles. I'm always surprised how many obscure PDFs it correctly recognizes and indexes for me.

Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

#25
post #13

Zotero really need more advertisement. I prefer Zotero over Mendeley, but Mandaley seems to advertise much more to university.

Even though I also like Zotero better because of its open nature, I prefer Mendeley in practice mostly because it has a decent Android client where you can just sync all your PDFs and read them on a tablet or something. Seemed a bit more involved to do the same with Zotero (where it seemed there were only minimal Android clients quickly hacked together). Mendeley also has 2GB storage, so that's nice for personal use…

> I definitely don't feel that I'm enabling or > supporting Elsevier somehow in using their freeware.

If instead of using Elsevier's freeware you were to file bug reports - not code just reports - on Zotero then you could be helping improve the software.

And when you suddenly _do_ need to collaborate you'll find that you are using the same tool you have gotten used to, instead of the dissonance of using a tool that is similar-but-not-quite what you know.

Go ahead and use Zotero, check out the two or three leading Android clients, and file bugs. You've got these clients currently: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gimranov.z... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=computer.benja... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.ezbio.zote...

Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

#26
post #14

The site is not very clear about if it's possible to self host the server part, but hopefully the server is the PHP application at https://github.com/zotero/dataserver

Yes. You can self-host a WebDav server and easily point Zotero at it.

Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

#27

Does it only store the metadata or does it have the power to store the full text, whether pdf or website or other document? Could you use this like a digital "commonplace book"?

You can store pdfs and other article files, and sync them across devices. The first 300MB are free, and there are 2GB, 6GB, and unlimited-storage paying tiers.

Actually you can couple it to any WebDAV compatible cloud system. You can connect it to your own Nextcloud instance and have the limitations be your hardware.

Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can store pdfs and other article files, and sync them across devices. The first 300MB are free, and there are 2GB, 6GB, and unlimited-storage paying tiers.

You can also just set up a WebDAV server and sync that across devices. Works pretty damn well.

Huh, that's interesting! Do you know of a blog post where this is spelled out?

Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

#29
Zotero blew my mind when I discovered it last year. Works almost flawlessly.

I subsequently tried contributing but got lost in the weeds of the somewhat unwieldy codebase. In part because it's interface is based on XUL and I don't know wtf is going on there. I think they're slowly migrating to either electron or something else. If you know XUL and have some free time, please consider contributing.

Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

#30

> Zotero is the only software that automatically senses research on the web. Need an article from JSTOR or a preprint from arXiv.org? A news story from the New York Times or a book from a library? Zotero has you covered, everywhere. Is there a way to make it work with SciHub? Asking for a friend... ;).

Citationsy works with Sci-Hub... just saying :) https://citationsy.com/blog/new-feature-citationsy-archives/
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