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Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

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Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#51

Post by turboaspie »

medimikka wrote: post #35

Zotero is, if you're not in the market for a closed source silo like EndNote, the only game left in town. Mendeley went full on Evil, and Papers for Mac is Mac only, closed source, and missing dozens of functionalities that are absolutely a must have in academic writing and research. An absolute must have is BetterBibTex ( https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/ ), which adds better Citekey management and, my perso…

>Zotero can do anything EndNote can do, is Open Source, and with that won't drive your PI up the wall with yet another expense.

My university offers EndNote (plus Web of Science and the Clarivate stack) for free for students and many of them don't use it - they'd rather manually manage the bibliography in their Word documents. The university even ran tutorials to show them how to set it up, add citations, and export the references, thinking maybe the students didn't understand the value of bibliography management software. Nope, even with the tutorials there was almost no uptake.

It turns out the problem was EndNote all along. I tried it myself - one of the worst user experiences imaginable, and I could totally understand why even doing references by hand is preferable. Eventually I told some of my own students that I use Zotero and to give it a go even though we're not supposed to endorse other software. Two weeks later most of them were using it.

So I'm actually quite confused at the fact that Zotero is offered as a free alternative to EndNote, unless the EndNote that I've used is some weird dated inferior version...

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#52

Post by temp8964 »

kergonath wrote: post #28
temp8964 wrote: post #23

What I (and believe many others) really want is a self-hosted Zotero server. See question has been asked: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/73721/zotero-self-hoste... https://www.reddit.com/r/zotero/comments/d270kv/zotero_datas... https://github.com/zotero/dataserver/issues/105 https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/48335/foss-... https://groups.google.com/g/zotero-dev/c/9FdSz0kIG_4?pli=1 Unfortunately,…

I’m in the same boat. Plus, the iPad app was not great at the time, which is very important to me (I read and annotate papers a lot on my iPad, it is an ideal device for this). I dug a bit to see if it was likely to be resolved soon, and it did not seem like it. So I find another solution, which in retrospect was a good thing since that was 5 years ago and the situation has not changed since. FWIW I ended up using Bo…

Is this (https://github.com/iandol/bookends-tools) the Bookends you referring to ? I don't care about citations. All I need is a PDF organizer have categories / tags and can add notes / make annotations.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#53

Post by robertknight »

jabl wrote: post #20

I used to use Mendeley, but after the evil empire bought them out and added anti-features like preventing export of the DB (or something like that, I don't remember exactly what it was anymore), I switched to Zotero. I was on the verge of exiting academic research at the time, so I don't have as much experience of Zotero, but it seems very solid. Strongly recommended! (Occasionally I wonder about how Zotero developme…

> added anti-features like preventing export of the DB (or something like that, I don't remember exactly what it was anymore)

The application's internal SQLite database was encrypted. The user-facing export functionality is still there, as are the public APIs used to interact with the data stored online. One of the engineers involved is a friend of mine. From what I understand the change to the internal DB was an over-zealous response to GDPR concerns.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#54

Post by jptech »

jabl wrote: post #20

I used to use Mendeley, but after the evil empire bought them out and added anti-features like preventing export of the DB (or something like that, I don't remember exactly what it was anymore), I switched to Zotero. I was on the verge of exiting academic research at the time, so I don't have as much experience of Zotero, but it seems very solid. Strongly recommended! (Occasionally I wonder about how Zotero developme…

I have been and still am a Zotero user. But I found it unfortunate that back in grad school many of my peers still used Mendeley. The school library even had workshops/classes in which they taught how to use the software. I found it ironic that despite paying loads of money to Elsevier for the journal subscriptions, they were advertising their software too!

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#55

Post by medimikka »

WayToDoor wrote: post #46
medimikka wrote: post #35

Zotero is, if you're not in the market for a closed source silo like EndNote, the only game left in town. Mendeley went full on Evil, and Papers for Mac is Mac only, closed source, and missing dozens of functionalities that are absolutely a must have in academic writing and research. An absolute must have is BetterBibTex ( https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/ ), which adds better Citekey management and, my perso…

> Mendeley went full on Evil Could you explain what happened with mendeley? I've been using it for a while, and didn't notice anything different really.

Mendeley joined the Elsevier "Family." Elsevier is one of the big three making massive amounts of money by selling content they receive for free, paid for by the tax payer or non-profits.

I strongly believe, that this has greatly contributed to the "Joe Roganization" of the pandemic, hiding true science and research, often created under the auspices of governmental research trusts, behind a paywall. Anyone not in academia (where Elsevier charges hundreds of thousands to institutions to give their researchers access to their own papers) is more or less SOL and gets their data from Joe Rogan.

In that vain, Elsevier has a tight control on the app now. Zotero has the ability to find the open access version of a paper, Elsevier will always link to the paywalled version on its own servers. Zotero has (and Mendeley had) the ability to export libraries, and with that data, Elsevier removed that when they took over Mendeley development. And, worst of all, Zotero can run standalone, Mendeley now requires an Elsevier ID login. The company actively analyzes your reading data and advertises other Elsevier properties based on your interests and reading habits.

This is academia. It should be open and accessible. Elsevier is doing everything they can to change that. And Mendeley is one weapon in their arsenal.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#56

Post by dfraser992 »

medimikka wrote: post #35

Zotero is, if you're not in the market for a closed source silo like EndNote, the only game left in town. Mendeley went full on Evil, and Papers for Mac is Mac only, closed source, and missing dozens of functionalities that are absolutely a must have in academic writing and research. An absolute must have is BetterBibTex ( https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/ ), which adds better Citekey management and, my perso…

I forget why I didn't like Zotero - I am using iLibrarian [0]. It is positioned as a SaaS, but the source is available and you can host it yourself. But I can't speak to how it compares to other software as I am not continually using it. It seems I just like collecting scientific papers rather than actually reading them.... Maybe if I live to 150 will I manage to read them all.

[0] https://i-librarian.net/

And I wholeheartedly second the fact Mendeley is Evil. I got sick of the bugs.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#58

Post by medimikka »

turboaspie wrote: post #51
medimikka wrote: post #35

Zotero is, if you're not in the market for a closed source silo like EndNote, the only game left in town. Mendeley went full on Evil, and Papers for Mac is Mac only, closed source, and missing dozens of functionalities that are absolutely a must have in academic writing and research. An absolute must have is BetterBibTex ( https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/ ), which adds better Citekey management and, my perso…

>Zotero can do anything EndNote can do, is Open Source, and with that won't drive your PI up the wall with yet another expense. My university offers EndNote (plus Web of Science and the Clarivate stack) for free for students and many of them don't use it - they'd rather manually manage the bibliography in their Word documents. The university even ran tutorials to show them how to set it up, add citations, and export…

Did you use EN9 or EN20? I found EndNote to be usable, just not something I'd pay $130 (student/academic version) for.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#59

Post by bonoboTP »

WayToDoor wrote: post #46
medimikka wrote: post #35

Zotero is, if you're not in the market for a closed source silo like EndNote, the only game left in town. Mendeley went full on Evil, and Papers for Mac is Mac only, closed source, and missing dozens of functionalities that are absolutely a must have in academic writing and research. An absolute must have is BetterBibTex ( https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/ ), which adds better Citekey management and, my perso…

> Mendeley went full on Evil Could you explain what happened with mendeley? I've been using it for a while, and didn't notice anything different really.

They got bought by Elsevier who I don't trust for a moment and they are pushing some weird social media angles and the whole thing smells of proprietary vendor lock in, walled-garden etc. Zotero is much more hacker-friendly.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#60

Post by dfraser992 »

No one has mentioned iLibrarian yet. No idea how its feature set compares to Zotero or Mendeley (I haven't used them much as I found them annoying in some ways) but there is a free self hostable version as well as the SaaS product. It is sufficient for managing my archive of papers.

https://i-librarian.net/

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