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We tried to migrate a reference library with more than 17k entries, but it never worked out beyond 2k. Sorry to say: might be fine for small personal projects, for anything serious I don't see how.
Do you mean it did not work out for you performance-wise or the export process failed?
I found Zotero very confusing to use. But maybe I am not the target demographic. I have always just used vim txt files for notes, using cli tools like grep to find what I need.
It's especially useful for multiple people writing the same research paper as the library can be shared.
Zotero is an amazing tool and I could not imagine writing papers without it. For collaborative writing, it syncs the bibliography with overleaf[2] and google docs. The browser add-on allows to build your library with one click while browsing, and it parses wonderfully meta-data from all (most) publishers and pre-print servers. Then my unique bibfile (symlinked in every project) is continuously updated to reflect new items or manual changes.
But I use it even for non-publishing side of research: one can save webpages (with snapshots) and write notes with formatting around them. My personal research workflow involves note-taking with the markdown app Zettlr[2], from which I can cite my Zotero library using simply `@[Author:Title:Year]`. I can then build notes from a twitter thread and stats.stackexchange.com answers, then connect it with papers and blog posts that way, and a specific chapter of a book with my annotation on the cloud. It not always straightforward as a workflow but it works wonders.
And the team is very responsive on the forum and on twitter. If one of the dev is ready this, thank you so much for making researchers life way easier !
EDIT: I just realised I can share my libraries online. A bit ashamed because it is very messy, but in case you are wondering what a Zotero library looks like, here is the link to mine [4] (without the notes and the embedded pdf and data files because I cannot share all of them. Moreover, I don't use the folder structure anymore so its very messy).
[1] https://www.zotero.org/support/pdf_reader_preview
[2] I recommend the BetterBibTex extension for anything related to tex, it'll save you a lot of time
[3] https://zettlr.com, another great app.
- the FireFox connector for ingest,
- export to bibtex, and
- the "Zoo for Zotero" app from the Play Store to pull the content down to a Samsung tablet for portable reading.
It’s such a weird feature that’s missing and it really important when collaborating on a paper.
It’s free and better than the alternatives I’ve tried (endnote, mendeley, Google docs)
I found Zotero very confusing to use. But maybe I am not the target demographic. I have always just used vim txt files for notes, using cli tools like grep to find what I need.
I use zotero for managing research and bibliographies. But it’s so weird that their web version (the only one I’ll ever use) doesn’t make it easy to share bibliographies with other people. It’s such a weird feature that’s missing and it really important when collaborating on a paper. It’s free and better than the alternatives I’ve tried (endnote, mendeley, Google docs)
We tried to migrate a reference library with more than 17k entries, but it never worked out beyond 2k. Sorry to say: might be fine for small personal projects, for anything serious I don't see how.
(Occasionally I wonder about how Zotero development is going. IIRC they were planning to switch from XUL to Electron many years ago, maybe that plan got shelved or they just don't have the manpower to do it..)