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

zotero.org

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

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sharing zipped files of PDFs amongst people is quite possibly a copyright violation. Do you have distribution licenses for all the material you ar referencing?

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

#82
The best thing about zotero is that becuase it is open source, you xan customize it a lot. You can even add sci-hub addon that lets you get the pdf from sci-hub for non open source sources. So if I 'm interested in a paper for reading, citation or anytjing else I just add it using one click (using browser extension) then it is ready for reading. I can do bibrex (using the addon). I can use zotfile which give much functionality, I add iPAD sync and highlight the paper and then extract that to zotero.

Sci-hub addon of course ia not even listed or recommended by zorero community (for obvious reasons) but this mix is very good punishment for elsevier for all the horrible things they do to science. And how even their Mandeley is evil now.

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

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, scientifi…

Let’s say you are working on a paper with 6 coauthors for a major medical journal, hypothetically. Dr. So and so in Russia, another in Japan, a third in California, and a few others. Would you mind reviewing this draft? Oh, yeah, by the way, you need to install Zotero before you can edit the references. How do you think that is going to go? How about dealing with a graphic designer in Hungary who can’t copy the text out of the document because there are weird hyperlinks that copy out with the references and don’t work with the InDesign. Oh, and the PM at DDB says the citation manager crashed and could you please resend the PDFs. I have worked with some big name journals and there are major interoperability issues that make this software undesirable for publishing in many scenarios.

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

#85
This is pretty timely. I was a big user of Papers 3, but I refused to "upgrade" to the Readcube Papers 4 version, as it switched to a subscription model that does nothing for me. Papers 3 just about still works on my comparatively up to date version of OS X, but it refuses to upload some flavours of pdf and hard errors more frequently than it used to.

So I have been eyeballing Zotero, and a little put off by possible migration snags. Has anyone performed this migration? What was the outcome?

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But Joe Rogan listeners aren't using Mendeley. These issues are separate, but you're angry at both and are somehow mixing them. The paywall can be circumvented via sci-hub. And more and more papers are now on biorxiv and similar.

And I don't think medical misinfo has much to do with Elsevier or academia. It's human nature, and the quality and degree of evidence-basedness of official communications doesn't really help.

Also, the words "misinformation" and "fact check" make my skin crawl.

If your conclusion is that the plebs is so dumb because they listen to Joe Rogan instead of The Science(TM), I think you're just digging in deeper.

Also, during the pandemic, many blue check Twitter accounts said it's a pity that so many conspiracy theorists and fake news believers are reading papers and playing around with data. They should just receive The Science, spoon-fed, and accept it, and too much thinking and reading hurts them. In other words, think about what you wish for. When other people are given access to data, they may reach different conclusions than the approved respectable media expert consensus.

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

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

please tell us what you think they are too!

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

#90
Paperpile is a good alternative. I don't mind paying for them, though only hitch is that they are dependent on Google Drive alone to save your papers. Not technically open source, but they have come a long way with exciting features on the roadmap.
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