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Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

zotero.org

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Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#181

Post by lvs »

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…

Specifically switched over to Zotero because of the non-profit status. The only privacy feature request I'd make is to allow some kind of self-hosted sync, i.e. a deployable TLS sync server + preferences entry to specify a sync server ip/port. I imagine it would take load off you guys for syncing, and people would end up hosting sync servers for small groups on university networks.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#182

Post by sytelus »

I'm using diigo for the same purpose. It seems to have similar features and more, especially easy tagging instead of having to deal with folders. Diigo also allows annotation, offline copies, search within text, export whole collection etc.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#183

Post by sytelus »

dbancajas wrote: post #167
generatorguy wrote: post #12

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!

is there anything like this but for blog posts and online links? please don't say pinboard

Yes - try diigo.com. All my links + references lives there.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#184

Post by sytelus »

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.

This. The paper I want to cite, I actually make an effort to go to its author's website and grab bib from there. That's the only definitive source of how the author wants to be cited. Grabbing bib from automated tools has created bib hell that we rely upon Google Scholar to clean up via fuzzy matching which screws up things quite often.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#185

Post by boyband6666 »

radus wrote: post #175
boyband6666 wrote: post #138

I have used Zotero for my [part time] PhD and found it a great tool (I submitted last week). Whilst I love it, its a bit cranky, and it's a shame it doesn't have things that would clearly elevate it to the level of (or beyond) others like endnote and the elephant in the room of Mendeley: - doesn't play nice with cloud storage - seems you should be able to just pick your cloud provider and let it sync up. Instead if y…

Sync your metadata with Zotero but the files in the cloud - you just need to make sure your settings are compatible between machines (storage locations etc).

That's what I do, but it took a while to get there.

Since I would say 80% of people have some level of cloud storage now (University, employer, personal), there should be a simple setting to pick one, and the location. Make it easy for people and win users!

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#188

Post by tonyg »

crazygringo wrote: post #94
xyzal wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It does, but it's only partial - it'll only export the basic stuff.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#189

Post by Cenk »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #171
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'm not sure I can buy into citationsy. From its website, there's too much contradictory marketing hype: > We don’t have to promise to keep your data safe — because we don’t collect it in the first place... Citationsy lives in the cloud and is accessible from anywhere... Your data is saved in the cloud and backed up every 10 minutes > Nothing to install, update, or patch... Use our iPhone and Android apps to cite boo…

The first sentence should read “personal data”, but you’re right, the copy is not great. To be fair though, you compiled bits of sentences from completely different sections to make it look more contradictory than it is.

To be clear, Citationsy has no tracking and collects as little personal data as possible.

When you cite something we keep your citation data on our servers, of course. You can download all your citation data at any time in various open formats (BibTeX, CSL-JSON, etc).

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#190

Post by bloopernova »

sidpatil wrote: post #58
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…

> 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.

I like the Firefox bookmarks manager a lot, especially the tags you can apply to a bookmark then search on.

If I get good enough with Lisp, I want to write an importer that takes all the tags from my bookmarks sqlite db, write them into org-mode files with each tagged bookmark listed in the relevant file.

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