Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

zotero.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 211 posts

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#91

Post by dstillman »

memming wrote: post #84

I don't use Zotero any more, but from the receiving end, the BibTeX it exports is terrible. Lots of non-ascii chars, bizarre nested curly braces, wrong capitalization detection, etc. I dislike collaborating with colleagues who use Zotero because it takes so much time to clean up their BibTeX entries.

Ask your colleagues to use the Better BibTeX plugin for Zotero, which includes vastly better support for BibTeX-based workflows.

Zotero's built-in BibTeX export is mostly intended as a generic data transfer format to other similar tools. It could surely be improved, and we'd be happy for patches, but contributions tend to go to Better BibTeX, since that's what people who care about BibTeX are using. (Zotero will export ASCII BibTeX if you choose "Western" instead of "Unicode" for the export charset, though.)

(Disclosure: Zotero developer)

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#92

Post by thatmathguy »

getpolarized wrote: post #68
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.

We're shipping a new version of Polar ( https://getpolarized.io/ ) this weekend that is sort of closer to the roam/zettelkasten idea of managing notes. Here's a video explaining the new functionality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M6jNlairGc Basically all the documents you read can have tags. So you can manage all your documents via whatever tag you want. You can then read those documents in Polar directly and hig…

Would love to see an option to choose which pdf viewer Polar launches. Wouldn't mind losing out on some features (for lack of integration) as long as I can use my Evince.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#93

Post by jjoonathan »

dstillman wrote: post #70
mncharity wrote: post #57

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…

...and you don't automatically upload pirated scihub papers to Elsevier cloud storage, like Mendeley does. That feature alone makes you a winner on the privacy front as far as I'm concerned!

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#94

Post by crazygringo »

xyzal wrote: post #66
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/

It should be noted that Mendeley encrypts user database, presumably to lock in its users: https://eighty-twenty.org/2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db

Does it have any kind of export functionality at all?

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#95

Post by rollinDyno »

bloopernova wrote: post #27
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.

I'm gently easing myself into the Roam knowledgebase management style by using Emacs+org-mode+org-roam. It's definitely one of those topics where you could spend a huge amount of energy organizing but not much actually doing :) Regarding roamresearch.com: How do you find yourself writing/organizing pages? Daily journal with a log of what you did first, then linking out from there? (don't feel pressured to write a nov…

What I do is just annotate absolutely everything. I try not to think much about structure. What matters is that my thoughts are put down into text. Structure and organization comes later.

Once your second brain is searchable, you can quickly find those keywords and the context thanks to Roam bidirectional links. This is one way to approach your notes, when you know what you're looking for.

Another way to approach your notes is by browsing. You can create a page with the structure or outline that you come up with, and then fill them with links to blocks in other notes. In here, you can practice a step of progressive summarization and rephrase your notes.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#96

Post by rollinDyno »

ethanwillis wrote: post #50
Flockster wrote: post #41

The killer feature of zotero is, that it is customizeable with different plugins. One very neat one is the integration with scihub. So you just paste in the DOI and it automaticly downloads the paper and adds all the metadata.

Pretty sure I'm the author of the plugin you're talking about :) I did a few updates recently, but I welcome any additions/PRs anyone wants to send.

Can you please link to your plugin?

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#97

Post by qdot76367 »

ethanwillis wrote: post #50
Flockster wrote: post #41

The killer feature of zotero is, that it is customizeable with different plugins. One very neat one is the integration with scihub. So you just paste in the DOI and it automaticly downloads the paper and adds all the metadata.

Pretty sure I'm the author of the plugin you're talking about :) I did a few updates recently, but I welcome any additions/PRs anyone wants to send.

You are amazing and have saved me so much time. Thank you so much.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#98

Post by rollinDyno »

getpolarized wrote: post #68
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.

We're shipping a new version of Polar ( https://getpolarized.io/ ) this weekend that is sort of closer to the roam/zettelkasten idea of managing notes. Here's a video explaining the new functionality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M6jNlairGc Basically all the documents you read can have tags. So you can manage all your documents via whatever tag you want. You can then read those documents in Polar directly and hig…

Can Polar automaticlaly extract the metadata from a journal article?

Also, while I can see tags being useful, I don't think it'll really be Zettelkasten-like until you can link from one annotation to another.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#99

Post by pkilgore »

I used this to research and write what was essentially my thesis graduation requirement from law school in 2012. Good tool, I'm happy more people are finding out about it.

It's up there with calibre in terms of "meh" UI but just excellent functionality.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#100

Post by pergadad »

hu3 wrote: post #69
rikelmens wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an open source project. Feel free to fork it and remove parts you dislike.

OP's criticism were fair enough to not deserve a dismissive response. I for one am thankful for their warnings.

See the response by the developer and the actual page linked. It seems op didn't actually read the link he posted and the critique was fully incorrect.
Post reply on HN