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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

#61

Post by bonoboTP »

medimikka wrote: post #55
WayToDoor wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 aca…

The Joe Rogan part makes no sense to me. Only a fraction of the listeners of the podcast would otherwise go out of their way to read primary science journal articles. Reading those is a skill and requires background knowledge to be able to read between the lines, shared context between experts etc. Scientific articles aren't written for a lay audience.

Also, sci-hub exists.

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

#62

Post by jjoonathan »

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.

Hypothetically speaking: going to scihub, pirating an Elsevier paper, and then uploading proof that you had done so to an Elsevier cloud account doesn't strike me as the brightest of moves.

Not in the sense that I think you are guaranteed to see consequences, or in the sense that I've actually heard about it actually going sideways, but to my intuition it does seem like the kind of thing that might attract one of those "pay us $10k or we sue you for $10M" letters down the line.

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

#63

Post by turboaspie »

medimikka wrote: post #55
WayToDoor wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 aca…

Not defending Elsevier's practices, but people who get their information about the pandemic etc. from Joe Rogan are probably not going to read (or even understand) a research paper from an academic/medical journal. The problem with misinformation isn't lack of access - there are plenty of accessible, high quality articles that are written for the layperson - the problem is that people are reading (either through choice or The Algorithm) misleading and sensationalised tabloid clickbait.

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

#64

Post by dwiel »

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.

In addition to the other responses to this question, they also got rid of their browser plugins that let you quickly add arxiv pages/pdfs/etc in one click with automatic metadata detection. Worked from any browser on Android and desktop. I've yet to find anything like it.

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

#66

Post by cycomanic »

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 use zotero and I really want to like it, but it's not that good. The tagging functionality seems like an afterthought, the bibtex support is only reasonable with betterbibtex and even with it I have issues. For example journal abbreviations don't work consistently, every start up I get told that the betterbibtex styles have changed and I need to restart zotero... File management is also only bearable with zutilo, and I still get issues with sync and somehow some file locations getting messed up.

The whole note taking experience is also quite soso.

I really wish there was a good bib manager around. I don't want to go into a proprietary silo (ruling out mendeley endnote etc.). Jabref is in many ways better then zotero when one uses bibtex, but unfortunately some parts of the UX are not my thing. The best app I have used was docear, the concept of a Mindmapping app together with a bib manager was great however it is unfortunately not maintened any longer.

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

#67

Post by medimikka »

bonoboTP wrote: post #61
medimikka wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aca…

The Joe Rogan part makes no sense to me. Only a fraction of the listeners of the podcast would otherwise go out of their way to read primary science journal articles. Reading those is a skill and requires background knowledge to be able to read between the lines, shared context between experts etc. Scientific articles aren't written for a lay audience. Also, sci-hub exists.

> Also, sci-hub exists.

Try adding one of those papers to Mendeley. Or, for that matter, get it by request from the author. Legal and often fast. Add that. See what Mendeley does with the CiteRef.DOI and CiteRef.URI fields...

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

#68

Post by westcort »

medstrom wrote: post #45
westcort wrote: post #40

I write a lot of academic papers and never use this kind of software. EndNote creates uneditable references and slows down Word, Zotero had some limitations after which they charge a monthly fee, and none of the reference libraries are easy to share with external clients. Most other medical/technical writers I know only use these tools as a “reference library.” It might be useful for someone writing a thesis, but alm…

What reference library is easy to share with external clients then? Also, what do you mean by "external clients"?

Clients, editors, etc. Internal clients might be an editorial department within a holding company that works across agencies, for example. I know I am getting downvoted, but it’s a reality that these systems have caused issues for companies like mine and have not been widely used in professional publishing, mostly due to interoperability issues.

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

#69

Post by jiggunjer »

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…

Having used Zotero, Mendeley and Endnote I ended up on Endnote. I like their metadata scraping, their Word plugin and that many journals offer a pre-configured reference template. But yes as a DBMS it lacks alot in the filter/grouping features and date fields don't convert format intelligently.

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

#70

Post by bonoboTP »

medimikka wrote: post #67
bonoboTP wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Joe Rogan part makes no sense to me. Only a fraction of the listeners of the podcast would otherwise go out of their way to read primary science journal articles. Reading those is a skill and requires background knowledge to be able to read between the lines, shared context between experts etc. Scientific articles aren't written for a lay audience. Also, sci-hub exists.

> Also, sci-hub exists. Try adding one of those papers to Mendeley. Or, for that matter, get it by request from the author. Legal and often fast. Add that. See what Mendeley does with the CiteRef.DOI and CiteRef.URI fields...

Are we talking about Mendeley or the general Elsevier paywalls? Seems like you are complaining about several issues at once: Mendeley's restricted features, Elsevier's paywall (that can be relevant even for non Mendeley users) and JoeRoganization, by which I guess you mean that his guests don't always confirm mainstream expert consensus (The Science).
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