I'd like to switch to Zotero, but I've been using Mendeley for a good 5 years, and built a decent workflow around it. I was wondering if anyone here took the leap and made the switch, and could perhaps point out some of the biggest differences between both tools?
Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
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Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
#92Zotero is awesome. 80% of the academic type people I've introduced it to have switched. The other 20% have Endnote stockholm syndrome.
Endnote. Ugh. When I used it a decade ago it was the worst program I have ever used. Try to look up something and nothing happens. Is it thinking? Is it connecting to a server? Did it just not find any results? There's no way to tell because it doesn't tell you anything.
Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
#93The ability to host your attachments (.pdf files mostly) on your own WebDAV server is very useful.
Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
#94I used Zotero through my MA and into my PhD, when I discovered and began writing in LaTeX in emacs/AucTeX instead of LibreOffice. I used the Better BibTeX plugin [0] to maintain a BibLaTeX file, but as I developed my emacs skills I moved to RefTeX.
At that point I realised that my BibLaTeX file was really a mess. Better BibTeX created tons of needless double curly brackets {{like this}} in the BibLaTeX file, making searching it directly a pain. And it created lots of @misc entries, the BibLaTeX entry of last resort, when it should have made @url's and other things.
Zotero has massively benefited my work, but it's also been something of a training wheel which in the longer term slowed me down. Emacs/AucTeX/RefTeX does everything Zotero does (at least according to my use) but faster, cleaner, more holistically, and with more features (eg crossref'ing entries). And two years on I'm still cleaning up that Better BibTeX's BibLaTeX file.
[0] https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/
* edited because I confused AucTeX with RefTeX.
Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
#95Zotero 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?
Yes, I use that function in Zotero all the time.
Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
#96I used Zotero while going through University and it seemed revolutionary at the time. There wasn't really anything else that could properly import the citation info from journals, web sites, etc so easily. Most of them you would have to type everything in manually. Zotero changed all of that and truly made it easy. Glad to see that it has kept getting better and better.
Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yes, I use that function in Zotero all the time.
Why not just use pdfgrep?
Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
#98It is ok not great. Lack many features. If they make app they can bring in many features from other citation managers very simple way. But all the citation managers out there half cooked softwares and so is this one. It is just a very basic tool with no features. Mendekey is better, papers is good, endnote is good but all those are expensive and not free except mendeley. So if they want it for just a regular bare minimum use tool then it is ok but otherwise power users and more trouble free versions are as mentioned above however these paid softwares also lack serious features even after paid. So you can’t expect much from free versions. Also zotero design is not sleek clean. It looks very raw and clumsy. Which can be easily improved by better interface design.
Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
#99Docear is another interesting project. Unfortunately though, Docear isn't nearly as active as it once was. http://www.docear.org/
I came in just to give a shout out to Docear as well. There is an extensive blog post comparing Docear, Zotero and Mendeley made by Joeran Beel (Docear's team)[0]. I can't recommend it enough. It helped to get the review of my MSc thesis done easily combining a mind map approach to actually cliackable pdf links (in sync in multiple pcs), all this with bibfile integration. I actually blogged about it in portuguese [1].
However due to the literary suite paradigm I would recommend Jabref (which is integrated in Docear) instead [2], if you are coming from Zotero/Mendeley, which is what I Did. Docear alone is capable of much more. I was not aware it is not really active these days. It is really unfortunate.
[0] https://www.scss.tcd.ie/joeran.beel/blog/2014/01/15/comprehe... [1] https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/apresentando-o-docear/ [2] http://www.jabref.org/
Re: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
#100I used Zotero through my MA and into my PhD, when I discovered and began writing in LaTeX in emacs/AucTeX instead of LibreOffice. I used the Better BibTeX plugin [0] to maintain a BibLaTeX file, but as I developed my emacs skills I moved to RefTeX. At that point I realised that my BibLaTeX file was really a mess. Better BibTeX created tons of needless double curly brackets {{like this}} in the BibLaTeX file, making s…
I guess I don't see how you can easily add citations without something like Zotero (or its closed source equivalent Endnote). At least in my use case, I go to Pubmed and click the Zotero Chrome plugin to add the reference to Zotero. What do you do, manually enter the info?