I think that Citavi is extremely useful.
Ditching Zotero for a Text File
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Ditching Zotero for a Text File
#22Zotero is not just a front-end to BibTeX. Here are some things I like about Zotero off the top of my head: Zotero integrates well with various online services. This I think is Zotero's most valuable feature. The simple fact is that not everything exports BibTeX. Can you get a library catalog to export BibTeX? Perhaps in CS, most publications provide good BibTeX, but a lot of journals I (a mechanical engineer) deal wi…
tbh I never cared about bibtex features from Zotero... Having a interface where I can place and organize pdfs, filter them by author and have everything syncronized between my tablet and my computer is what really makes me use it.
If this kind of feature could be replaced by txt files I probably would be using it, but, no...
Re: Ditching Zotero for a Text File
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> First I used Claude Code to generate all the BibTex files for the PDFs I think this has an unnecessary risk of hallucinated bibliographic data. For anyone doing something similar in the future, it would be more reliable to make a LLM generate a list of DOIs and have Zotero import the DOIs.
Using a non-deterministic machine on something which needs to be pretty accurate and precise looks like playing Russian roulette with one's academic integrity. It's not my cup of vodka, to be sure.
And moreover, something already mostly solved algorithmically. Eg in zotero you can drag and drop files and it generates a reference based on the metadata as long as that is enough (somebody mentions it is not possible in newer versions, I use the latest version and it works fine).
Each one can choose their own tools of course, but we often see llms shown as solutions to something presented as unsolvable before, while it already was pretty amenable to normal tools.
Re: Ditching Zotero for a Text File
#24Zotero obviously stores data in an SQL db. It's not quite a text file, but it's been around forever, and it's easy to parse directly, too.
Re: Ditching Zotero for a Text File
#25> just glorified front-ends for BibTeX These frontends are necessary however because researchers in non-computer related fields are not trained/proficient at command line tools. Many of them need help installing software. Many of them don’t use raw text files much either. They use MS word files instead etc.
I mean even if you are comfortable with grep, it is still not enough, plus then you have to reinvent all the rest of the functionality, ie an extension to automatically add references from a webpage, download pdfs and keep them in a directory with some local link to be able to find and open them, and then another tool to export a subset of the huge bibtex file for each specific project and sync them, as it would not make sense to share a huge bibtex file on every latex project where you need only a small subset.
Re: Ditching Zotero for a Text File
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using a non-deterministic machine on something which needs to be pretty accurate and precise looks like playing Russian roulette with one's academic integrity. It's not my cup of vodka, to be sure.
And moreover, something already mostly solved algorithmically. Eg in zotero you can drag and drop files and it generates a reference based on the metadata as long as that is enough (somebody mentions it is not possible in newer versions, I use the latest version and it works fine). Each one can choose their own tools of course, but we often see llms shown as solutions to something presented as unsolvable before, whil…
> but we often see llms shown as solutions to something presented as unsolvable before, while it already was pretty amenable to normal tools.
I see that as a symptom of being intellectually lazy, or not knowing the value in mastering a tool via deliberate use over time.
Once one invests the required time to use a tool properly, they can reap way more benefits from said tool when compared to jumping tools at minute's notice.
Re: Ditching Zotero for a Text File
#27I used zotero through both a bachelor's and masters. It is amazing software. And it integrates with nearly everything. It completely takes the friction out of literature reviews and research whilst providing much more that a single text file. The snapshotting and auto pdf download are the best parts.
I like me some cli, but if I was to do something similar it would be with csl-json and jq/nushell. I cannot see the advantage of grepping a bibtex file, let alone having to manually manage the related articles.
Re: Ditching Zotero for a Text File
#28This sells Zotero short in so many ways, but you do you, I guess. Have fun hand formatting between the dozen citation/reference formats every other journal chooses, seemingly at random
Why would you need that? 99% of the time, you'll just grab the BibTeX from where you're getting the paper (Google Scholar, arXiv, ResearchGate, etc.) and paste it on the .bib file. LaTeX will take care of formatting it when you \cite.
I was wrong. I was not aware that biblatex had these features so easily available. Learned something.
Re: Ditching Zotero for a Text File
#29How does Zotero compare to Paperpile these days? When I first found Paperpile, I was astonished how seamless the browser extension based citation and PDF auto-import worked and never looked back. But I imagine Zotero has come a long way as well?
Re: Ditching Zotero for a Text File
#30I find most of my references while browsing, and capture from the browser is Zotero's winning feature for me: automatically save the pdf and extract the bibliographic data. And while reading a paper, I get a search engine to look up its references and repeat.
The rest of the interface is ok.