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Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

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Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#71

Post by westcort »

akjssdk wrote: post #49
westcort wrote: post #40

I write a lot of academic papers and never use this kind of software. EndNote creates uneditable references and slows down Word, Zotero had some limitations after which they charge a monthly fee, and none of the reference libraries are easy to share with external clients. Most other medical/technical writers I know only use these tools as a “reference library.” It might be useful for someone writing a thesis, but alm…

Only if you want to sync pdfs using the Zotero server does Zotero cost money. Anything else is completely free, including syncing your db (without pdf attachments). If you want to sync your pdfs you can point Zotero to a webDAV server, this has worked flawlessly for me.

Fair enough, but not every client is going to want to use the same operating systems, processors, be allowed to install third party software, etc. This might work in a strictly academic setting with few stakeholders, but in professional publishing, interoperability makes these systems unpopular. Downvoting that won’t change reality. I guess there is not much interest in feedback or possible routes to improvement.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#72

Post by medimikka »

turboaspie wrote: post #63
medimikka wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mendeley joined the Elsevier "Family." Elsevier is one of the big three making massive amounts of money by selling content they receive for free, paid for by the tax payer or non-profits. I strongly believe, that this has greatly contributed to the "Joe Roganization" of the pandemic, hiding true science and research, often created under the auspices of governmental research trusts, behind a paywall. Anyone not in aca…

Not defending Elsevier's practices, but people who get their information about the pandemic etc. from Joe Rogan are probably not going to read (or even understand) a research paper from an academic/medical journal. The problem with misinformation isn't lack of access - there are plenty of accessible, high quality articles that are written for the layperson - the problem is that people are reading (either through choi…

I find myself being surprised by people more often than disappointed.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#73

Post by westcort »

medstrom wrote: post #45
westcort wrote: post #40

I write a lot of academic papers and never use this kind of software. EndNote creates uneditable references and slows down Word, Zotero had some limitations after which they charge a monthly fee, and none of the reference libraries are easy to share with external clients. Most other medical/technical writers I know only use these tools as a “reference library.” It might be useful for someone writing a thesis, but alm…

What reference library is easy to share with external clients then? Also, what do you mean by "external clients"?

Zipped folders of PDF files sent via e-mail.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#74

Post by theteapot »

cycomanic wrote: post #66
medimikka wrote: post #35

Zotero is, if you're not in the market for a closed source silo like EndNote, the only game left in town. Mendeley went full on Evil, and Papers for Mac is Mac only, closed source, and missing dozens of functionalities that are absolutely a must have in academic writing and research. An absolute must have is BetterBibTex ( https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/ ), which adds better Citekey management and, my perso…

I use zotero and I really want to like it, but it's not that good. The tagging functionality seems like an afterthought, the bibtex support is only reasonable with betterbibtex and even with it I have issues. For example journal abbreviations don't work consistently, every start up I get told that the betterbibtex styles have changed and I need to restart zotero... File management is also only bearable with zutilo, a…

+1 for Jabref and a bibtex database.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#75

Post by only4here »

cycomanic wrote: post #66
medimikka wrote: post #35

Zotero is, if you're not in the market for a closed source silo like EndNote, the only game left in town. Mendeley went full on Evil, and Papers for Mac is Mac only, closed source, and missing dozens of functionalities that are absolutely a must have in academic writing and research. An absolute must have is BetterBibTex ( https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/ ), which adds better Citekey management and, my perso…

I use zotero and I really want to like it, but it's not that good. The tagging functionality seems like an afterthought, the bibtex support is only reasonable with betterbibtex and even with it I have issues. For example journal abbreviations don't work consistently, every start up I get told that the betterbibtex styles have changed and I need to restart zotero... File management is also only bearable with zutilo, a…

I agree that there are definitely better alternatives to Zotero.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#76

Post by medimikka »

bonoboTP wrote: post #70
medimikka wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, sci-hub exists. Try adding one of those papers to Mendeley. Or, for that matter, get it by request from the author. Legal and often fast. Add that. See what Mendeley does with the CiteRef.DOI and CiteRef.URI fields...

Are we talking about Mendeley or the general Elsevier paywalls? Seems like you are complaining about several issues at once: Mendeley's restricted features, Elsevier's paywall (that can be relevant even for non Mendeley users) and JoeRoganization, by which I guess you mean that his guests don't always confirm mainstream expert consensus (The Science).

Mendeley changes certain fields on import to always download its abstract PDF as the reference paper with a link to its paywall. In essence, those things are PDF archivers and citation managers rolled into one. If I were to send you my latest research and you'd import it into Zotero, you'd get a managed citation and my paper. In Mendeley you'd get a managed citation and a downloaded abstract version with CrossRef to their paywall.

The reason this happens is Elsevier's business model. And this business model both really wrecked Mendeley and, I believe, contributes to medical misinformation being more dominant in the world.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#77

Post by theteapot »

I heard an article on the radio the other day (BBC) about some researcher developing meta data standards to embed bibliography data into PDFs. Basically stash the relevant refs from your bibtex (or other) database into the PDF in a machine readable way and develop open source tools to parse that and allow navigation to online or local sources. Seems like a pretty good idea. But I can't remember who it was / what it's called. Anyone?

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#78

Post by account-5 »

I wouldn't say I'm a power user but Zotero is amazing. It loads my university citation style no hassle, has a browser plugin which works pretty good.

Ive never managed to get the Zim-Wiki plugin to work though.

All in all an excellent piece of software.

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#79

Post by dstillman »

Brakenshire wrote: post #65
designium wrote: post #3

I use Zotero as a bookmarking too. It saves the files and articles offline.

Do you know if you can do full text search for saved webpages? That would be useful.

Yes, Zotero can do full-text search of PDFs, webpages, and text files. It can also sync the full-text index separately so that you can do full-text searches without keeping the files on every device.

(Disclosure: Zotero dev)

Re: Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research

#80

Post by cycomanic »

westcort wrote: post #71
akjssdk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you want to sync pdfs using the Zotero server does Zotero cost money. Anything else is completely free, including syncing your db (without pdf attachments). If you want to sync your pdfs you can point Zotero to a webDAV server, this has worked flawlessly for me.

Fair enough, but not every client is going to want to use the same operating systems, processors, be allowed to install third party software, etc. This might work in a strictly academic setting with few stakeholders, but in professional publishing, interoperability makes these systems unpopular. Downvoting that won’t change reality. I guess there is not much interest in feedback or possible routes to improvement.

You're getting down voted because you comment seems uninformed. AFAIK Zotero is available on every OS that Firefox runs on, for example. Also you talk professional publishing, what does that exactly mean? Zotero is a reference manager, so largely aimed at academic writing (because they tend to be the ones who cité and use references the most). I would be surprised if any other setting has more stakeholders, scientific articles often have lots of coauthors, from different groups and I can sayas an academic keeping track of thousands of papers by grepping through PDFs is not really feasible.

So maybe your use case does not match what a reference manager is for, but you also have not brought any informed criticism.

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