I've used this for years, it's one of the first applications I add to a new build. Keeps all of my reading synced including backup copies of the material.
Zotero: Personal Research Assistant
51–60 of 211 posts
Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant
#52I'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!
So does Zotero.
Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant
#53I started using zotero after reading about it in the nytimes, I guess it's about 11 years ago. I'm pretty sure it's this article, because its the same date as the first book I added. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/defeating-b...
I mostly just used it for keeping lists of books with tags (to read, which library has them, on my kindle etc) and some notes. The bibliography report is nice. I know its is targeted toward research, but it really is good for people who just like to read books if for nothing else to remember what they have read!
I think the really nice thing about it is how easy it is to add books. When I was using a kindle a lot, just add it from amazon. Recently I've been reading a lot more books from archive.org, and again its really easy to add it, just one click.
Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant
#54The problem with this (and Mendeley, Papers, Bibtex, etc.) is that each paper/thought is isolated. Roam Research ( http://roamresearch.com/ ) is my new jam.
How do you export?
Seems like a wiki but proprietary?
Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant
#55I had a quick look at Zotero's github but couldn't quite work out how they render their desktop UI - is this an electron-style app or a browser extension of some sort?
I haven't used it in a couple of years, but then it seemed to be using Qt/GTK/something.
I believe there is a browser extension too, but the main program is (was) a non-electron stand-alone deal.
Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant
#56Zotero was also the first reference manger to use CSL, the Citation Style Language [1], now adopted by many other apps including Mendeley and Citationsy. [1] https://citationstyles.org
From the link: > 9500 free CSL citation styles. Should I ask how it has come to be that there are 9500 citation styles? Or will it make me angry and depressed at the lack of cooperation and widely accepted standards?
I believe most of them are the same, but with a different name. So, for my convenience, I don't need to think what citation style a journal uses, I just go and download the citation style with its name, even if I have the same style installed for another journal.
Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant
#57Zotero 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/support/privacy#disabling_automatic_r...
Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant
#58Also chiming in to say I used Zotero for my Master's thesis and I was happy with it. With some plugins (I don't remember exactly) I had a very nice pipeline of "find paper on the interntet" -> Zotero -> automatically updated .bib -> trigger rebuild of Latex document to PDF -> automatic reload in PDF viewer. The UI is somewhat dated but the functionality is great. Nowadays I would probably choose Citationsy, maybe onl…
> The UI is somewhat dated but the functionality is great.
I like Zotero precisely because of its UI. It's efficient, and reminds me of the Firefox bookmarks manager.
In fact, I wish I could replace or merge Firefox's bookmark manager with Zotero, so I'd get the best of both worlds.
Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant
#59I had a quick look at Zotero's github but couldn't quite work out how they render their desktop UI - is this an electron-style app or a browser extension of some sort?
It's XUL. It used to be a Firefox extension, before Firefox changed how those work.
Re: Zotero: Personal Research Assistant
#60Zotero 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…
It's an open source project. Feel free to fork it and remove parts you dislike.