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Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

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Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#31

Post by Bedon292 »

djaque wrote: post #13
tobias2014 wrote: post #8

I've used Mendeley Desktop for some time, which I believe is very similar in functionality (but proprietary, yes Elsevier!): https://www.mendeley.com/download-desktop-new/ Furthermore I think http://www.docear.org/ deserves to be mentioned as another free open-source solution with some interesting mind-mapping functionality: http://www.docear.org/software/screenshots/

I actually specifically chose Zotero over Mendeley because Mendeley is owned by Elsevier. Their company has always been a toxic influence on publishing. Recently they even added a new dark pattern so that when you click the "download PDF" button on their articles it opens up a web app reader loaded with tracking instead of just giving you a PDF. You then have to spend time and click through about three menus to reall…

I agree that Elsevier is toxic, and wish they didn't own Mendeley. Unfortunately, at least the last time I compared them, Mendeley was way better than Zotero for my personal use and just couldn't use Zotero. The cloud sync and sharing, the lit search, and all were just so much more compelling. I do think its been long enough I might poke at Zotero again and see if its caught up.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#32

Post by jszymborski »

pks016 wrote: post #26
dotdi wrote: post #11

Also chiming in to say I used Zotero for my Master's thesis and I was happy with it. With some plugins (I don't remember exactly) I had a very nice pipeline of "find paper on the interntet" -> Zotero -> automatically updated .bib -> trigger rebuild of Latex document to PDF -> automatic reload in PDF viewer. The UI is somewhat dated but the functionality is great. Nowadays I would probably choose Citationsy, maybe onl…

Same here. I used it for my first Master's thesis(in biological sciences). I could not make Mendeley work with Word. Zotero works great for writing thesis and research paper with Word.

It also plays well with Latex :) There's a BibTeX output style that works really well.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#34

Post by 131012 »

dotdi wrote: post #11

Also chiming in to say I used Zotero for my Master's thesis and I was happy with it. With some plugins (I don't remember exactly) I had a very nice pipeline of "find paper on the interntet" -> Zotero -> automatically updated .bib -> trigger rebuild of Latex document to PDF -> automatic reload in PDF viewer. The UI is somewhat dated but the functionality is great. Nowadays I would probably choose Citationsy, maybe onl…

I highly recommend the zotfile plugin! In itself, this plugin made zotero more interesting than the competition.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#35

Post by abdullahkhalids »

zneveu wrote: post #18
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #4

My workflow is: 1. Come across paper pdf on the web. 2. Use Zotero firefox plugin to import it into Zotero. Zotero is able get citation data, and automatically exports it to a bib file. 3. Use emacs helm, which reads the bib file, to cite papers in my documents. I would have really loved to have this workflow during my Phd, but I was doing everything manually back then. My only complaint is this recent silent change…

Check out the "better bibtex" extension to zotero for exporting to bib files, I find it helps with unicode/utf-8 characters and might fix that alphabetical problem.

I am indeed using that. The bug reports claim it is a Zotero problem and not a better bibtex problem.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#37

Post by DamnInteresting »

I started using Zotero a few months ago when a major Firefox update rendered the Scrapbook extension non-functional. It's nice to be able to take quick snapshots from Chrome or Firefox and save them to the local document repository. I found this guide helpful in getting things set up:

https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-use-zotero-and-scrivener-for-...

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#38

Post by gpanders »

perchard wrote: post #25
bigbossman wrote: post #17

The problem with this (and Mendeley, Papers, Bibtex, etc.) is that each paper/thought is isolated. Roam Research ( http://roamresearch.com/ ) is my new jam.

Roam is awesome but this and other reference management software serves a different purpose (for me, at least). I use BibDesk (like Zotero and other examples mentioned here) in conjunction with a plaintext (markdown) Zettelkasten[0]. BibDesk to save references (papers etc.) and copy formatted citations; which are then pasted into Zettels (c.f. a page in Roam). [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the…

I do this exact same thing! If I write a new Zettel that references something I read in a book (for example), all I do is get the ISBN of the book (usually off of Amazon), use Zotero's auto-import feature, copy the reference and paste it into my note. The whole thing takes all of ~20 seconds, it's very efficient.

I know Zotero has a lot of other features, but 99% of my workflow with it is what I described above.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#39

Post by tetris11 »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #37

I started using Zotero a few months ago when a major Firefox update rendered the Scrapbook extension non-functional. It's nice to be able to take quick snapshots from Chrome or Firefox and save them to the local document repository. I found this guide helpful in getting things set up: https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-use-zotero-and-scrivener-for-...

For the cloud side, there was a nice tool for linking a Google Drive full of PDFs with entries in your Zotero database, bypassing the cloud storage limits.

https://github.com/mtekman/ZoteroGoogleDrive-PDFLinker-Cloud

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#40

Post by Freak_NL »

dotdi wrote: post #11

Also chiming in to say I used Zotero for my Master's thesis and I was happy with it. With some plugins (I don't remember exactly) I had a very nice pipeline of "find paper on the interntet" -> Zotero -> automatically updated .bib -> trigger rebuild of Latex document to PDF -> automatic reload in PDF viewer. The UI is somewhat dated but the functionality is great. Nowadays I would probably choose Citationsy, maybe onl…

Used it for my Master's thesis in 2009 (with LaTeX via xelatex), for my wife's Master thesis in 2011 (idem), and now we use it to keep a catalogue of the books we own (just a small home library of about a thousand titles). For the latter Zotero is also great because of its integration with on-line library catalogues. You just type in the ISBN number in the magic box, and the book's metadata is there — in any language!¹ Mostly just a few tweaks to the data are necessary, but it works rather well.

1: Tested with English, Dutch, German, and Japanese novels.

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