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Zotero Better Notes – Knowledge management inside Zotero

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Re: Zotero Better Notes – Knowledge management inside Zotero

#3
Zotero was key to finish my long delayed thesis, reducing the toil of managing a lot of references on a topic that I disliked more and more by the minute. Unfortunately back in the day they did not have yet the embedded PDF reader and highlighting features, but still was super helpful (I decided to stay away from Mendeley for license and affiliation reasons)

I still keep Zotero around for some projects that require more serious bibliography management. Glad to see advances in the note management direction, even if it is a add-on. While serviceable, the default note options always felt a bit rough to me.

Re: Zotero Better Notes – Knowledge management inside Zotero

#7
I’m using Zotero + Obsidian for my academic work and PhD.

If anyone is trying to work out a Zotero to Obsidian to Word/Libre Office workflow, give it a look.

I’ve created a GitHub repo README with instructions on linking everything together.

Hopefully someone finds this useful, happy for more contributions also (hence why used a repo to do this)

https://github.com/evolve2k/obsidian-pandoc-academic-word-do...

Re: Zotero Better Notes – Knowledge management inside Zotero

#9
Zotero is awful. It's heavyweight - in fact, a whole separate browser only to manage my bibligraphy (ever tried to use it with ~10k items?). Provides no CLI interface (to automate workflows with scripts). It's data model is weird - e.g., item types include such thing as "instant message", but more academia-relevant types (e.g., "dataset") are absent ("preprint" was incorporated only recently); ISSNs are treated as properties of articles rather than journals. And it boasts it has included its own PDF viewer, whereas I see it as down-side rather than improvement (more bloatware included - why not just follow the division of labor and delegate this functionality to external viewers... ahhh, yes, there is no annotating standard among PDF viewers...).

But all other alternatives for bibliography management I know of are even worse.

Re: Zotero Better Notes – Knowledge management inside Zotero

#10

Nice! This seems to actually solve a problem in my workflow with Zotero: manage the _personal_ metadata around the references. How did I find the reference? What parts are relevant? Etc. Definately going to give it a try.

Yeah, I just stumbled upon this project and wanted to share, I'm currently using Obsidian for my personal wiki, but I use Zotero a lot as a paper repo and reader, the organization and metadata tools are great, and extending it to a more powerful note-taking tool seems like a no-brainer.

Now it just needs an EPUB reader to replace Calibre, then it'd just be the perfect all-in-one personal library. For now I'm using this plugin that exports and keeps in sync the calibre library to Zotero:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3339191

Very grateful that this open source project stays alive, I've seen attempts over the years from startups and other projects to tackle on spaces like pkm, research, paperless office, to then be abandoned yet Zotero keeps getting updates.

There's also Tropy, from the same organization that develops Zotero, for organizing digital assets:

https://tropy.org/

Getting a bit off-topic, but this thing could use some sort of Moodboard designer to visually sort the assets in a canvas, kind of what you can do with Miro, Notion, Mural or locally with Obsidian Canvas/Excalidraw. On that note, there's also this project that takes on that space, previously featured on HN but has made significant progress lately:

https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE

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