Zotero - Bibliography Managing Software (Jan/26/2009 )

Anyone looking for a good reference managing software, try Zotero. It's great and free.

Those who have been using it from before . . . new features have been added to make it better. I have not personally seen them but reading the Zotero blog, they sound cool.

Have been looking into Zotero 1.5 Beta for quite sometime now and am impressed. It has got the right features we have been asking for - nothing can ever beat this now.

Give it a try!

I'd try beta, but it currently doesn't work with the OpenOffice and Word plugins. That's what I need most.

Trof on Feb 26 2009, 11:21 PM said:

Trof, they have plugin for the Beta but before U jump to 1.5 be sure to read the Data Loss Warning. I was not using the integration for quite some time as not writing anything. I tried switching back to the old version but could not. It seems like it is just one way.

http://www.zotero.org/support/sync_preview

This page also has the link to the plugins that work. I tried and it worked for OoWriter.

Phew.. so many years...

 

I now stared to work with Zotero again. And I love it!

 

I have Standalone version, that doesn't need stupid Firefox to work. Database transversion from the old one worked fine. The search feature is fantasticly working now and I love the Duplicate entries finder the most!

Also Word/Libre Office plugins are far better than they were, so the type-in field works nice and easy.

I use the Chrome Zotero Connector, since there is not one for Opera still, save mostly directly from Pubmed, so no problems.

 

I also edit my own XSL citation styles, so it's really cool to have a build-in testing in the Standalone Preferences. But.. I remember there was a online tool for "what you see is what you get" kind of style creation, but is not anymore for the styles version 2 (?).

 

I even registered now to have an online sync for backup.

 

Very nice! 

Still it saves the data in a very ugly "firefox" system of gibberish directiories, but well that doesn't bother most people ;)

what's wrong with Firefox? But well it was one reason not to use Zotero but Mendeley (though mostly I disliked the connection to another software itself independent of Firefox)

I don't use it (regulary). That's first. I needed to have it opened all the time for using Zotero plugins. Problem was I had a slow computer at a time and that my Firefox was merely a addons filled-up tool for special uses. Many plugins there took many resources. On the top of that Firefox is now one of the slowest browsers there is. And I don't like it's behaviour (to change it at least a bit.. more plugins needed).

 

So having opened a word processor, a browser I use and then Firefox on top for adding citations, that made my computer swap all the time.

 

I have a new one, but that still doesn't make Firefox a better browser.. I still stay with Opera as a main browser, but have Chrome opened on the occasion, for it's better Google support (or more likely for the lack of Google's support for other browsers now) so using it for adding new citations seems fine. And the Standalone Zotero is just a thin app, that reacts very quicky.

 

I had problems with Mandalay on it's start, that the PDF parsing wasn't any good. But that was of course years ago, I don't know where it went now. However Zotero now has as far as I know it's own PDF translator if needed (which mostly is not, as I can find all those in PubMed, only problem I have is with Books and Book Chapters, I don't know an easy way how to annotate these.. Books itself could be saved from Google books and then modified, but sometimes it doesn't fit Editors are in wrong order or so, that't not the problem of the translator, but of the site which has is badly specified, last time I downloaded Book info from Amazon :)

 

Also the ability to either asign a PDF file to a entry in Zotero (saved in Zotero directory and I pressume also synced), or only a link (which I prefer, the files stay where they were in directories, for access outside Zotero) technically adds all the advantages of Mandalay.

 

And.. most important, I didn't use Zotero primary as a manager of files, but as citation manager - add citations to manuscripts, Mendeley had no such features then. But now, how I see it, it could be used for both really fine.

I use Firefox almost only and never had issues with it though my computer isn't the fastest...anyway it's safe (and not giving information to company as it was with Chrome) and has many addons which make it safer and handier than other browsers...in my opinion though an overload of them surely kills performance.

And I guess nowadays the features of the citation managers are quite the same...for me the most important factor is the automatically (meta-)information retrieval for pdfs so that I have to do as less as possible...no idea which is better, but it's surely improvable ....

I'm not going to discuss Firefox further, cause FF is absolutelly cool only when compared to Internet Explorer   

 

My primary workflow is.. seach on PubMed -> read an abstract -> get a fulltext PDF.

So in this workflow, everytime you get past PubMed abstract page, that just simply downloades all the meta-data. And even when I have a PDF, getting it's abstract from PubMed is just matter of seconds. PubMed is standartized and translators have no problem with it. On the other hand, PDFs can have many sources, different formats, they can be old, new, picture-only, badly done, whatever.. so getting meta-data directly from PDF is from beginning a VERY difficult task. PubMed on the other hand has a uniform structure, so there is less errors possible.

 

I'm not saying Mendeley is bad, it's great they went the harder way. I checked it now, seems that in now is a citation manager too and it can use the same CSL style format and even import from Zotero. So now they are probably at the same level, it would be interesting to see a deep comparison of both (mmm, they do have a page comparing features of available citation managers, nice! there is only one unfair thing.. it says "no annotation and comments" possible for other managers, yet the PDF file itself has annotation and comments features, they are all available through fulltext search still). Mendeley still gives an emphasis on the "social" side though, which is a bonus, but it's not that important for me, at least not now.

Cool to know.