71–80 of 211 posts
Wouldn't have made it through my doctorate without Zotero. The plugins and MS Word integration made paper writing (almost) enjoyable! Instead of wasting hours on formatting my bibliography/citations, Zotero did the same work in about 2 minutes. Kudos to the folks who maintain this incredible resource, and a big personal thank you!
Zotero phones home with perhaps more information than you expect.[1] By default, there's a persistent connection whenever Zotero is running, a request when you visit a site with a translator (eg NYTimes) the first time since a browser start, when you download a PDF, etc. I enjoyed using it, but their approach to privacy felt creepy. That [1] is somewhat improved... but only somewhat. [1] https://www.zotero.org/suppor…
And Zotero can run completely offline, without an account.
Now compare that to Zotero's biggest competitor: https://www.mendeley.com/terms/privacy
I've been using http://www.qiqqa.com/ for 8 years and it does a fantastic job of organizing my PDFs and managing citations. It can do cloud based shared libraries as well. for me the killer feature is that it makes all the PDFs full text searchable so it is like my own personal google where the links never break and the content is all relevant. Highly recommend!
So does Zotero.
I have been quick to recommend Qiqqa whenever it seems like it might be a useful tool but I never really saw those comments get much traction - maybe because everyone was already using zotero?
Does anybody use this for non-academic purposes? I've been looking for something similar to use as a personal knowledge base, but zotero may be a bit much for that use case.
It's lightweight enough to not get in my way but still syncs everywhere and is searchable. There's even a third party app I can use on my phone if I need quick access to PDFs.
Zotero phones home with perhaps more information than you expect.[1] By default, there's a persistent connection whenever Zotero is running, a request when you visit a site with a translator (eg NYTimes) the first time since a browser start, when you download a PDF, etc. I enjoyed using it, but their approach to privacy felt creepy. That [1] is somewhat improved... but only somewhat. [1] https://www.zotero.org/suppor…
(Disclosure: Zotero developer) Criticizing Zotero for privacy, of all things, is a bit bizarre. Zotero is an open-source project from a nonprofit organization with no financial interest in people's research data. It's designed as a local tool specifically to give people complete control over their data, and it's developed in the open. Most similar tools are proprietary programs owned by major publishers or analytics…
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…
> The UI is somewhat dated but the functionality is great. I like Zotero precisely because of its UI. It's efficient, and reminds me of the Firefox bookmarks manager. In fact, I wish I could replace or merge Firefox's bookmark manager with Zotero, so I'd get the best of both worlds.
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…
Hi, helm-bibtex author here. Helm-bibtex has support for importing citations directly from CrossRef: Fire up helm-bitbex, type search terms (e.g., title of paper), select CrossRef option, select paper from search results and press "c" to copy BibTeX entry, "q" to close, then paste entry into your .bib file.
With all due respect to the excellent work you do (many thanks for that), my workflow does not require any manual work most of the time.
Zotero was also the first reference manger to use CSL, the Citation Style Language [1], now adopted by many other apps including Mendeley and Citationsy. [1] https://citationstyles.org
From the link: > 9500 free CSL citation styles. Should I ask how it has come to be that there are 9500 citation styles? Or will it make me angry and depressed at the lack of cooperation and widely accepted standards?
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.