61–70 of 122 posts
For anyone who is interested in the different options for reference management, I've been sporadically maintaining a webpage about the various options since 2015: https://maxmasnick.com/projects/reference-managers/ I re-un-recommended Mendeley back in June 2018 when this news first broke. (I was initially too sketched out by Elsevier to recommend Mendeley, and this just confirms these suspicions.) tl;dr Zotero is a p…
Reading through that, it seems like Mendeley uses SQLite for it's local database. There aren't that many SQLite encryption libraries around (generalising), so it's probably using either SQLCipher or SEE. https://www.zetetic.net/sqlcipher https://www.sqlite.org/see/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki There's a reasonable chance the page size and passphrase is stored or cached on the machine. If someone (not me) takes the time an…
Yeah, this sounds like an interesting reverse engineering challenge, do you need any special accounts to use Mendeley or can it be freely installed by anyone? It'd likely just be a hard-coded key, you wouldn't want to restrict people from copying their own databases around... probably.
I ended up adapting some code that scans an OSX process for AES key schedules and prints any keys that it finds (caveat - sqlite3 rolls its own AES and the key schedule ends up byte-swapped in memory).
I also had to write some Go code to decrypt the sqlite3 database file. There is code to read an encrypted database buried in sqlite3's revision history, but it's an old enough version of sqlite3 that it didn't understand dropbox's schema.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good idea re: giving context as to what these programs are. For most of us who do research, these programs are essentially interchangeable "reference managers." Here's what I mean: I read a scientific paper or look up a citation. I add that with a click or two to my reference manager. It also stores the PDF for me. In the future, I can easily re-read the PDF. I can annotate it and the annotations will be stored. Crit…
The only difference is that Mendeley has a built-in PDF viewer with annotation. Of course since you can no longer share these annotations, nor export the pdf, that's all pointless. Mendeley opens PDFs externally, but many PDF readers can create and save annotations.
Anyone else here use Jabref? I like it's simplicity.
Changes in 1.19 encrypted the database, but I think 1.19.2 restored this feature see: https://www.mendeley.com/release-notes/v1_19_2
Zotero has improved a lot, while Mendeley has repeatedly regressed. Mendeley used to be quite a good program, but recently you can not export annotated PDFs meaningfully. For example, sending a folder of annotated PDFs to a co-author during a literature review is impossible. This is obviously the case since Elsevier does not want you to trade research papers, whether you have lawfull access or not. The updates that t…
FWIW, I think they brought back exporting annotated PDFs in the most recent version, 1.19.3
At least maybe there is hope for exporting your work to Zotero.
Zotero has improved a lot, while Mendeley has repeatedly regressed. Mendeley used to be quite a good program, but recently you can not export annotated PDFs meaningfully. For example, sending a folder of annotated PDFs to a co-author during a literature review is impossible. This is obviously the case since Elsevier does not want you to trade research papers, whether you have lawfull access or not. The updates that t…
Can Zotero respect my filesystem organization (à la Lightroom)? I have thousands of papers organized, and don't want to move them all in (too much work, what if I don't like it?), but I also don't want to have two copies of some subset of the papers, which might not be in sync.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your institution does offer f1000 subscription, I suggest you take a look at f1000 workspace.
This is literally the worst thing you can do. Even a tenured professor doesn't seem to stay in the same institution for their lifetime nowadays so why would you go to a service that even you personally cannot pay for yourself (reasonably)?