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Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

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Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#161

Post by easygenes »

souterrain wrote: post #150
autocorr wrote: post #122

Zotero is simply a wonderful tool and I'm very grateful to the developers for it. As an academic, it is the only GUI program besides Firefox that I consider essential on one of my computers. Some of the features I enjoy: * free software * Linux and multi-platform support * browser extension "that just works" for ingesting items and magic lookup tool for DOIs and arXiv IDs (and I hardly ever have problems with the met…

I love Zotero for my academic work, but I'm contemplating using it more for less formal research as well. As Luhmann did, I'm trying to more frequently write summaries of articles—both actual academic articles and things like blog posts, news articles, even recipes. I prefer to handwrite these notes. For web links, I was thinking of using pinboard's caching feature which assigns a url like https://pinboard.in/cached/…

First thought for easy digitization of hand written notes is an iPad with pencil by your workstation. A BKM for integrating that into your Zotero workflow isn’t obvious though.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#162

Post by SubiculumCode »

dstillman wrote: post #70
mncharity wrote: post #57

Zotero phones home with perhaps more information than you expect.[1] By default, there's a persistent connection whenever Zotero is running, a request when you visit a site with a translator (eg NYTimes) the first time since a browser start, when you download a PDF, etc. I enjoyed using it, but their approach to privacy felt creepy. That [1] is somewhat improved... but only somewhat. [1] https://www.zotero.org/suppor…

(Disclosure: Zotero developer) Criticizing Zotero for privacy, of all things, is a bit bizarre. Zotero is an open-source project from a nonprofit organization with no financial interest in people's research data. It's designed as a local tool specifically to give people complete control over their data, and it's developed in the open. Most similar tools are proprietary programs owned by major publishers or analytics…

Love Zotero. I'd love to install it on my own server instance, although, I think by renting the Zotero storage space now, I'm helping support you and the whole Zotero project.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#163

Post by meej »

boyband6666 wrote: post #138

I have used Zotero for my [part time] PhD and found it a great tool (I submitted last week). Whilst I love it, its a bit cranky, and it's a shame it doesn't have things that would clearly elevate it to the level of (or beyond) others like endnote and the elephant in the room of Mendeley: - doesn't play nice with cloud storage - seems you should be able to just pick your cloud provider and let it sync up. Instead if y…

EndNote Libraries shouldn't be stored in the cloud, either, for the same reason. See the "General Safety Notes" at http://clarivate.libguides.com/endnote_training/home

Also, Zotero just revamped the Web Library interface. Check it out, it's very nice.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#164

Post by dstillman »

jmiserez wrote: post #153
mncharity wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. And agreed. One question, re "being a great offline solution", in what sense offline? Able to work without net? Thinking about dstillman's reply, I was thought-crawling towards a "local/remote vs online/offline" distinction. So Zotero would be local but always online (if net is available). Versus my expectation that when using only local resources, a local tool will be offline.

I think dstillman put it best, the features that make Zotero actually useful need to connect to the internet, like fetching metadata. You wouldn't want to enter everything by hand (but you can). I think your expectation is reasonable (a local tool will be offline when using only local resources), and it's definitely possible with Zotero (disable the automatic translator/style updates) but just not the default setting…

> The real question that I'd find interesting is why the translator/style updates must be "instant". For my use, once a day or once every few hours would probably be more than sufficient.

Before Zotero had push-based auto-sync, translator/style updates were indeed once a day, but that meant that, if a high-profile site changed and we pushed out an updated translator, we'd continue to get reports of the site being broken for 24 hours. We could say to update translators manually, but that would only help the people who made it to the forums.

When we added WebSocket support for syncing, we decided to send translator/style update notifications over the same connection. For anyone using auto-sync anyway (many/most users), there's no difference. If you don't use syncing/auto-sync, it's more debatable, but it's a choice between trying not to expose IP addresses that are likely already making at least some other anonymous requests (app updates, retraction checks, OA PDF checks) and decreasing the amount of breakage that users encounter after we've already fixed something.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#165

Post by meej »

Woetoewoetoe wrote: post #126

When you import a work into your bib, always check if it got the right data! Sometimes it categorizes something as the wrong type of file, or it wil even implement the data of a whole other article. This can make it impossible for you to find the data back when you actually need it.

One good habit is to never import using the browser plugins until the page is fully loaded. Otherwise, papers often get imported as web pages with no PDF attachments.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#166

Post by jmiserez »

dstillman wrote: post #164
jmiserez wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think dstillman put it best, the features that make Zotero actually useful need to connect to the internet, like fetching metadata. You wouldn't want to enter everything by hand (but you can). I think your expectation is reasonable (a local tool will be offline when using only local resources), and it's definitely possible with Zotero (disable the automatic translator/style updates) but just not the default setting…

> The real question that I'd find interesting is why the translator/style updates must be "instant". For my use, once a day or once every few hours would probably be more than sufficient. Before Zotero had push-based auto-sync, translator/style updates were indeed once a day, but that meant that, if a high-profile site changed and we pushed out an updated translator, we'd continue to get reports of the site being bro…

Very interesting insights! Makes sense with the WebSocket reuse and the support requests.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#167

Post by dbancajas »

generatorguy wrote: post #12

I've been using http://www.qiqqa.com/ for 8 years and it does a fantastic job of organizing my PDFs and managing citations. It can do cloud based shared libraries as well. for me the killer feature is that it makes all the PDFs full text searchable so it is like my own personal google where the links never break and the content is all relevant. Highly recommend!

is there anything like this but for blog posts and online links? please don't say pinboard

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#168

Post by BostonEnginerd »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #140
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the response. I am aware of that functionality. I, however, usually find papers using the browser (either searching google scholar or on arxiv/scirate). Zotero, then lets me click one button (most of the time), and the entry is available to be cited using a nice citekey (firstauthorYear), and the pdf is placed in my pdf folder with the right filename. With all due respect to the excellent work you do (many…

I guess you have to manually export your bibliography, but, still, that's a pretty streamlined workflow. There's definitely room for improvements within Emacs.

The BetterBibTeX plugin for zotero automatically keeps the BibTeX file in sync with the database.

Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

#170

Post by luroc »

elcomet wrote: post #148
autocorr wrote: post #122

Zotero is simply a wonderful tool and I'm very grateful to the developers for it. As an academic, it is the only GUI program besides Firefox that I consider essential on one of my computers. Some of the features I enjoy: * free software * Linux and multi-platform support * browser extension "that just works" for ingesting items and magic lookup tool for DOIs and arXiv IDs (and I hardly ever have problems with the met…

> I then keep a primary repository of notes in a flat folder with links between them and the literature notes as my makeshift Zettelkasten Could you give more details about this ? Do you sync the notes to a folder ? How do you do this ? And how to you browse your notes ?

I implemented the zettelkastem system with vimwiki for myself and I think it's great for that if you are into vim.
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