What makes this different than Devonthink other than the citation management?
Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research
101–110 of 206 posts
Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research
#102I love and I use exclusively Linux but sometimes I despair: > How do I install Zotero? Mac Open the .dmg you downloaded and drag Zotero to the Applications folder. You can then run Zotero from Spotlight, Launchpad, or the Applications folder and add it to your Dock like any other program. After installing Zotero, you can eject and delete the .dmg file. Windows Run the setup program you downloaded. Linux Download the…
Seconded, some effort by the core team towards packaging Zotero in a deb would be very welcome.
Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research
#103I 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…
Interested to hear more about this, so how do you create citations and bibliographies? How do you format the bibliographies according to each journal’s style?
It is true that there is no good tool for editing references collaboratively. Previous attempts at this have resulted in some poor sod having to redo all the citations.
Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research
#104Zotero is a great tool for references. I am using it for 10+ years mostly for research papers in LaTeX+bib but also for things like "Read It Later" and notes. I find it more straightforward to use than EndNote or Mendeley and Zotero works perfectly fine with my library of about 7K entries. Also it has a useful feature that lets you save your PDFs on a WebDAV server of your choice like pcloud.com or self-hosted.
Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research
#105I have tried Endnote, Mendeley, Paperpile, Sciwheel and Zotero (back when it was firefox only, which was a long time ago).
I currently use and pay for Paperpile. I found the user experience to be the best for my purposes, mainly the ease of importing articles. The word plugin is hassle free as well. They seem to be pretty competent developers eg Mendeley’s iphone app wouldn’t sync properly for literally years, whereas Paperpile’s app was good from day one.
The downside of Paperpile is lock-in to the Google ecosystem (only works on Chromium browsers, although firefox and safari support is coming). There is also no quick way to tag or categorise papers at the time of import from the web, you need to go to the app.
Sounds like Zotero is pretty good now though, might have to check it out again.
Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research
#106Earlier 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…
> "Joe Roganization" of the pandemic
Not sure what that means? Is he hiding true science and research?
Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s say you are working on a paper with 6 coauthors for a major medical journal, hypothetically. Dr. So and so in Russia, another in Japan, a third in California, and a few others. Would you mind reviewing this draft? Oh, yeah, by the way, you need to install Zotero before you can edit the references. How do you think that is going to go? How about dealing with a graphic designer in Hungary who can’t copy the text…
I'm not really seeing it. In most of the workflows I've used, one person is responsible for maintaining most of the document including the bibliography. The other coauthors will add in notes requesting to add in a new item, etc. Zotero is used primarily for managing the PDF library, the actual writing will happen in Word, LateX, etc. The reference list produced by Zotero is just text. I don't see any real requirement…
Maybe I'm wrong and it is a very valuable tool I should be using. I just haven't seen it used in my industry over the past 2 decades. All I have heard about are major problems arising with use of this kind of software. Surely that experience has to count for something? I don't have any problem with others using it. I am just saying that when I submit a paper to a major journal, these kinds of tools generally are not used because of interoperability issues that inevitably come up when multiple people work on a project.
Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research
#108Earlier 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...
There should only be one canonical DOI for any given article though--that's the whole point! I think the URI is also supposed to be to the "version of record" rather than wherever you happened to find a copy.
Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe Pages is free for Mac users. I do agree that Zotero is a an awesome product.
Yes, Pages is, but the only citation manager integrating with it is EndNote, because Apple keeps the API locked down and expects quite the payment and revenue share to open it up. On the upside, no one with a little bit of academic cred would use Pages.
We've started doing the "final assembly" of preprints and other self-formatted things in Pages. Placing Figures is still annoying in Pages, but far, far less than in Word.
LaTeX would be nicer but....biologists.
Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research
#110Just another user here, sharing some tips:
Zotfile allows automatic renaming of attachments, which includes moving the PDF file to a different folder. This means my zotero account still has plenty of free storage, while the space-consuming PDFs are stored in my university's effectively limitless cloud drive.
I use Recoll to fuzzy-search the text of the PDFs, or just pdf2text piped through grep for simpler searching.
Recoll is great, it's here: https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/
Like many others, I write docs in markdown and use pandoc and citeproc to render to Word, then libreoffice to convert to PDF since it reliably retains the formatting from a lightly-styled Word template. With citation style sheets I can be reasonably confident that citations and references will automatically take care of themselves - being tweaks for edge cases.
I use pp to pre-process the markdown, mainly to allow "includes" so I can write chapters/sections as separate files then combine them. All using a horrible render.sh script that I copy into every new project and tweak as required :)