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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

#131

Post by erie »

Yes, it was pure joy when-in 2009- Zotero beat Reuters: A Virginia Circuit Court judge dismissed a lawsuit this morning against George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media.

Thomson Reuters Inc. had sued the university in a Virginia court in September for at least $10-million in damages, claiming that Zotero, a free software tool created by the university, made improper use of the company’s EndNote citation software.

Zotero is a plug-in for the Firefox Web browser that is designed to help scholars store and organize their online research. The program, which could convert EndNote files, had been downloaded over one million times by September.

George Mason University said in November it had not renewed a site license for EndNote, and would not make any changes to its software.

A spokesman for the university confirmed the case had been dismissed but declined to comment further. Officials at Thomson Reuters were not immediately available for comment on the dismissal. — Marc Beja https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/judge-dismisses-...

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

#132

Post by threatofrain »

medimikka wrote: post #72
turboaspie wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 choi…

I find myself being surprised by people more often than disappointed.

The optimist is often disappointed and the pessimist often delighted.

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

#133

Post by arugulum »

wosk wrote: post #13

I highly recommend going for the beta version which features a (game-changing) built-in pdf reader[1], with annotations (searchable and synced with the beta iPad app) and many more improvements. 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 clic…

Personally, I don't like using the built-in PDF reader. Its annotations are in a proprietary format and aren't reflected in the PDF itself (which is how Zotero can keep track of them, because they're in its own format). That may work for some users/use-cases, but I like annotations to the PDF to be burned into the PDF, in case I'm using other programs as well. (I know you can export the PDF, but that's a whole other step).

Admittedly, the upside of using the built-in PDF reader is that you can have a seamless experience between desktop and mobile. But the reader itself doesn't have all the features I need.

Personally, I use Zotero + PDFExpert. The killer feature being to crop (desktop) or auto-crop (iPad) PDFs of papers, which often have an obscene amount of whitespace.

The nice thing about Zotero is that it's open enough to support both of our usage habits.

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

#135

Post by dstillman »

alanh wrote: post #134

Is there an easy way to "share" a URL from iOS/iPhone to Zotero? They have an iOS app in closed, full beta, with an App Store version apparently coming soon. In the meantime, are there solutions?

You can paste the URL or an identifier (e.g., DOI) into the save page [1], or even create an iOS shortcut that encodes the current URL into the 'q' parameter for that page.

Historically the solution was to use the bookmarklet [2], but you might need to disable "Prevent Cross-Site Tracking" in the Safari settings for that to work reliably.

But yes, the beta iOS app [3] supports full saving of metadata and PDFs via the Share sheet.

(Disclosure: Zotero dev)

[1] https://www.zotero.org/save

[2] https://www.zotero.org/download/bookmarklet

[3] https://www.zotero.org/support/ios_beta

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

#136

Post by Gatsky »

westcort wrote: post #113
Gatsky wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A RegEx-based parsing system in JavaScript helps with the reference formatting. EndNote makes references uneditable (unless you also have a copy of EndNote) and often cannot adjust to a particular journal's idiosyncrasies...but I can do that easily with home-built software. Zotero may be great, and I cannot really make an assessment one way or the other. All I know is that hardly anyone in my industry uses it. It's r…

I see, so you wrote your own solution which you have to maintain and extend for each different citation style… pros and cons to that obviously.

Why is it so important that a citation system works in 2003 and in 2021? Papers once published become historical artefacts essentially.

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

#137

Post by fjfaase »

I am doing research on a subject where almost all of the source material is in printed material, meaning that I have a lot of scans (photographs actually) that I want to reference. At first, I just extracted the facts, but then I discovered that I have to beter track the sources. What I would like is a process where I transcribe parts of the images, turn those text in some semantic format, describing the facts, and then have a tool to combine these facts and to resolve conflicts, because, yes, the source materials contain errors. I have thinking of developing my own tools for this, but if I could use some existing tool that would be nice.

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

#138

Post by cto_of_antifa »

bonoboTP wrote: post #87
medimikka wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mendeley changes certain fields on import to always download its abstract PDF as the reference paper with a link to its paywall. In essence, those things are PDF archivers and citation managers rolled into one. If I were to send you my latest research and you'd import it into Zotero, you'd get a managed citation and my paper. In Mendeley you'd get a managed citation and a downloaded abstract version with CrossRef to…

But Joe Rogan listeners aren't using Mendeley. These issues are separate, but you're angry at both and are somehow mixing them. The paywall can be circumvented via sci-hub. And more and more papers are now on biorxiv and similar. And I don't think medical misinfo has much to do with Elsevier or academia. It's human nature, and the quality and degree of evidence-basedness of official communications doesn't really help…

[dead]

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

#139

Post by leonry »

Similar to other commenters I would prefer some things over how they are done by Zotero. But what holds me back from switching to another solution is clearly the community. There are enough plug-ins to make Zotero work more as I wish and the people at the forum (https://forums.zotero.org/discussions) are very helpful.

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

#140

Post by kergonath »

krull10 wrote: post #95
temp8964 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.sonnysoftware.com/ Great Papers alternative if one wants Mac/iOS support and relatively good (but not perfect) importing from a Papers library.

Yes, that’s the one. I had been using Papers ever since version 1 beforehand, but I had to look for an alternative after the clusterfuck that was version 3.
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