51–60 of 197 posts
The only thing holding me back from using Zotero is that, afaik, you need to use a Zotero account to reliably sync metadata between devices (the Zotero Data Server isn't supported). I wish it was easier to self-host; there's no reason for me to interact with their servers. It's always a disappointment to find otherwise great open source projects that have key components that deny privacy.
Some people here are asking about paying for storage for the PDFs. My solution to this is to store my PDFs using Dropbox, and to use links in Zotero. That way, even if I give up on Zotero, I still have the files. And I already pay for Dropbox, and just don't want one more bill to pay.
And, woohoo, an iOS app! That's very sweet.
Zotero is one of those pieces of open source software that has really improved my life. I first discovered it as a teenager and it revolutionised writing papers and managing sources. Sadly I don’t find myself using it that much in my job. I always got a kick out of introducing it to my friends in the humanities and blowing their minds. I have no idea how anyone writes papers without zotero or another similar tool. Ke…
Agreed. What really blows my mind is how many of my academically inclined friends manage (and cloud sync) a big library of pirated papers using a rival piece of software owned by a major rights holder of said pirated papers. I mean... there's a good chance nothing will come of it, but it just seems like tempting fate. Zotero isn't just good enough, it's so good that the choice is completely trivial IMO! Thanks, Zoter…
Not just for scholarly reference management: Zotero is a great tool to keep track of the books you have if your personal library exceeds one or two Billies in volume. For books printed after 1970 the ISBN alone is enough to have it fetch the most relevant metadata for any book published anywhere from online catalogues. I find Zotero particularly useful when going to a book-fair; it is easy to export a list of titles…
one or two Billies in volume Possibly the most universal of all units of measurements. For the uninitiated: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/billy-bookcase-white-00263850/
The only thing holding me back from using Zotero is that, afaik, you need to use a Zotero account to reliably sync metadata between devices (the Zotero Data Server isn't supported). I wish it was easier to self-host; there's no reason for me to interact with their servers. It's always a disappointment to find otherwise great open source projects that have key components that deny privacy.
This looks really nice. Zotero has never stuck with me for some reason but I last used it a few years ago. I'll try again. One problem with this type of service is that there's usually a huge jump from unpaid to paid, but the jump to the lowest paid tier of Zotero lets you pay $20/year for 2 GB of storage. I can handle that. I have more difficulty with the $15/month and $90/year and such paid tiers. Even at $20/year,…
That's not that bad for a useful product, is it?
I used Zotero quite a bit in the past, the thing that ultimately drove me away is that when synchronizing you couldn't easily access the PDFs just via the filesystem. I use a nextcloud and also wanted to access PDFs from devices without Zotero installed and this turned out to be a pain at the time. Is this possible with more recent Zotero versions? Is the sync still cumbersome with a zotero account + self-hosted webd…
You can still access the pdf file via the file system by right clicking on the item and 'show file'. The files names may not be user friendly though.