Zotero is simply a wonderful tool and I'm very grateful to the developers for it. As an academic, it is the only GUI program besides Firefox that I consider essential on one of my computers. Some of the features I enjoy:<p>* free software<p>* Linux and multi-platform support<p>* browser extension "that just works" for ingesting items and magic lookup tool for DOIs and arXiv IDs (and I hardly ever have problems with the metadata)<p>* shared group libraries for collaboration with students<p>* offline only as well as sync<p>* the ability to add notes, tags, and relational links between items.<p>After reading about Luhmann's Zettelkasten[1] system, I've also had a great productivity boost by implementing a similar scheme in Zotero. After reading an article, I write up a summary of my ideas and thoughts and attach it to the article as a literature note. I then keep a primary repository of notes in a flat folder with links between them and the literature notes as my makeshift Zettelkasten. While not as stream-lined as some special purpose note taking tools, Zotero can do a pretty decent job at this while also having all the advantages of it's bibliographic system, file syncing, etc.<p>Something I wish it had for this purpose was an "auto-complete" for other entries and a graphical tree viewer of relations. However, these aren't so bad not to have, part of the genius of Luhmann's original paper card notes system seems to have been the critical thinking required to determine which handful (1 to 3) of notes are most related and the serendipitous discovery process from having to manually walk the note files when you need to find something.
Also chiming in to say I used Zotero for my Master's thesis and I was happy with it.<p>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.<p>The UI is somewhat dated but the functionality is great. Nowadays I would probably choose Citationsy, maybe only because I find the UI more aesthetically pleasing.
My workflow is:<p>1. Come across paper pdf on the web.<p>2. Use Zotero firefox plugin to import it into Zotero. Zotero is able get citation data, and automatically exports it to a bib file.<p>3. Use emacs helm, which reads the bib file, to cite papers in my documents.<p>I would have really loved to have this workflow during my Phd, but I was doing everything manually back then. My only complaint is this recent silent change in Zotero, where the exported bib file has entries in alphabetical order, rather than in last-added order. With the last-added order, when I popped open emacs helm, the last added paper would be on top. Now I have to search for it.
Zotero phones home with perhaps more information than you expect.[1]<p>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.<p>I enjoyed using it, but their approach to privacy felt creepy. That [1] is somewhat improved... but only somewhat.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.zotero.org/support/privacy#disabling_automatic_requests" rel="nofollow">https://www.zotero.org/support/privacy#disabling_automatic_r...</a>
The problem with this (and Mendeley, Papers, Bibtex, etc.) is that each paper/thought is isolated. Roam Research (<a href="http://roamresearch.com/" rel="nofollow">http://roamresearch.com/</a>) is my new jam.
I've used Mendeley Desktop for some time, which I believe is very similar in functionality (but proprietary, yes Elsevier!): <a href="https://www.mendeley.com/download-desktop-new/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mendeley.com/download-desktop-new/</a><p>Furthermore I think <a href="http://www.docear.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.docear.org/</a> deserves to be mentioned as another free open-source solution with some interesting mind-mapping functionality: <a href="http://www.docear.org/software/screenshots/" rel="nofollow">http://www.docear.org/software/screenshots/</a>
So another great thing about Zotero is that you can share public bibligraphies. I've taken to making a little QR code at the end of my presentations that links to my bibliography (since no one actually reads the bibs on your last 4 slides).<p>Here's an example from a talk I gave on Variational Autoencoders: <a href="https://www.zotero.org/groups/2350257/jszym_presentations/collections/GI7553H2" rel="nofollow">https://www.zotero.org/groups/2350257/jszym_presentations/co...</a>
I 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. <a href="https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/defeating-bedlam/?searchResultPosition=1" rel="nofollow">https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/defeating-b...</a><p>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!<p>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.
The killer feature of zotero is, that it is customizeable with different plugins.
One very neat one is the integration with scihub. So you just paste in the DOI and it automaticly downloads the paper and adds all the metadata.
Wouldn't have made it through my doctorate without Zotero. The plugins and MS Word integration made paper writing (almost) enjoyable! Instead of wasting hours on formatting my bibliography/citations, Zotero did the same work in about 2 minutes. Kudos to the folks who maintain this incredible resource, and a big personal thank you!
One of the killer features is the multi-platform support, including web browsers, in combination with synchronization across devices and the Google Docs plugin. Makes working on a paper across multiple devices super easy.
I don't use Zotero any more, but from the receiving end, the BibTeX it exports is terrible. Lots of non-ascii chars, bizarre nested curly braces, wrong capitalization detection, etc. I dislike collaborating with colleagues who use Zotero because it takes so much time to clean up their BibTeX entries.
Zotero was also the first reference manger to use CSL, the Citation Style Language [1], now adopted by many other apps including Mendeley and Citationsy.<p>[1] <a href="https://citationstyles.org" rel="nofollow">https://citationstyles.org</a>
I have used Zotero for my [part time] PhD and found it a great tool (I submitted last week). Whilst I love it, its a bit cranky, and it's a shame it doesn't have things that would clearly elevate it to the level of (or beyond) others like endnote and the elephant in the room of Mendeley:
- doesn't play nice with cloud storage - seems you should be able to just pick your cloud provider and let it sync up. Instead if you try and use cloud storage it'll most likely corrupt your library
- because of the above unless using their storage, it's hard to make work accross multiple computers (and never even tried on my ipad, which is a shame)
- can't export a reference pack
- interface is dated. I don't mind, but suspect it is intimidating to less technical folk and a bit of a barrier to entry (Mendeley is much more accessible)
- does require plugins and fiddling to get the most out of it, some of which seems unnecessary (why are they not in the main program?<p>Still, I've no regrets in choosing it in 2013, and think it's a fantastic piece of software. Hopefully it keeps on developing, and becomes the de facto standard :-)
I've been using <a href="http://www.qiqqa.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.qiqqa.com/</a> 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.<p>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.<p>Highly recommend!
When you import a work into your bib, always check if it got the right data! Sometimes it categorizes something as the wrong type of file, or it wil even implement the data of a whole other article. This can make it impossible for you to find the data back when you actually need it.
A thread from 2018: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606929" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606929</a><p>A little bit from 2008: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319975" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319975</a><p>Related from last year: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18977461" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18977461</a><p>(Links are for the curious. Reposts are fine after a year: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html</a>)
Easily one of the most useful programs I've installed for work.<p>Best feature is the web browser add-on. Can open up a few dozen articles during a literature search and dump all of them into Zotero for reading later.
I use Zotero for my research everyday, and I am a paying subscriber for their storage. I love it, and it is getting better. I recently discovered a new feature: I received a notification that one of the articles I had in my library had been retracted! That is pretty cool! The Word/Libre integration is solid.<p>When I saw Zotero at the top of HN, I suddenly wondered if they published a new tool. So I'm kind disappointed...but still love any attention they can get.
If you like Zotero, Dataverse[0][1][2] might be appealing as well!<p>[0] <a href="https://dataverse.org/" rel="nofollow">https://dataverse.org/</a>
[1] <a href="https://dataverse.org/software-features" rel="nofollow">https://dataverse.org/software-features</a>
[2] <a href="https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse</a>
Does it also have support for managing scans/photographs? I have about 10 Gbyte of images with respect to a research project about art works. The images also contain scans of materials. I would like to extract facts from these documents and maintain a link between those links and the scans. This means being able to annotate a part of an image, which for example is a text with an illustration or a mentioning of a certain art work.
I have used Zotero for years. I can't imagine writing a paper without it. I know some academics still do all their citations by hand. Fuck that shit. I can't imagine doing that - especially when journals often have their own citation style and if you get rejected by one and submit to another you may have to change all the citation formats.
I’ve recently started a little project for my own reference manager. Since I end up writing papers in Latex, I want my bib file(s) to be the ground truth and I’m slightly obsessive about things like consistent capitalization and author names. I’d rather not fight my reference manager to eventually produce the bib file I want if I can just create that bib file in the first place.<p>Everything I want from a reference manager can be done in a relatively simple command line tool with an interface similar to beets. Only the extraction of DOIs from PDFs looks like it will have to be a bit hacky, but if `ref im article.pdf` works for 90% of articles and asks me to provide the DOI for the other 10%, that’s good enough for me.
I wrote a Zotero extension many years ago when doing my PhD[1]. Unfortunately, recent changes have broken it, I can't figure out what's wrong (XUL is not exactly well-documented these days), and the developers aren't responsive[2]. :(<p>[1] <a href="http://mackerron.com/zot2bib/" rel="nofollow">http://mackerron.com/zot2bib/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zotero-dev/a1IPUJ2m_3s" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zotero-dev/a1IPUJ2m_...</a>
I've started using Calibre for these purposes, saving papers from arXiv to it, and can definitely recommend. It takes a bit of manual effort to add tags to the papers, but once you have a bit of a collection going they autocomplete. The only downside is lack of read/reading/unread status, but I've hacked around it by rating papers and books I'm currently reading one star. I'd love to have an easier method for importing the papers, but not enough to actually have tried to write the script yet.
I started using Zotero a few months ago when a major Firefox update rendered the Scrapbook extension non-functional. It's nice to be able to take quick snapshots from Chrome or Firefox and save them to the local document repository. I found this guide helpful in getting things set up:<p><a href="https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-use-zotero-and-scrivener-for-research-driven-writing/" rel="nofollow">https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-use-zotero-and-scrivener-for-...</a>
Does anybody use this for non-academic purposes? I've been looking for something similar to use as a personal knowledge base, but zotero may be a bit much for that use case.
I 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?
Just curious, what is Zotero's business model (as open-source software for academicians)?<p>It's most direct competition, Mendeley, has always been closed-source, and then got acquired by Elsevier.<p>To make it clear: I love that Zotero is open-source. And I am happy it is growing (I remember the early versions, well over a decade ago, when I was writing my Master's thesis). I am just curious if they are based mostly on the storage payments, grants, or voluntary work.
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.
Big thank you to the Zotero team (@dstillman) for your ongoing work, particularly the much improved web interface. One of my favorite features is to easily share a URL of a Collection with someone interested in the subject.<p>My setup: writing in Emacs with markdown, export with pandoc, which grabs Zotero's .bib file made with the Better BibTex plugin. Works really smoothly, though takes a little tinkering to get it set up on a fresh rig.
Does anyone know of a comparable tool for legal research (or plugin(s) that add this functionality to Zotero)? A good friend is in law school right now and has really been wanting a good citation manager, but when I pointed him to Zotero it ended up being lacking due to the absence of a standardized reference number and citation info that scientific papers have.
I use this all the time, it's a great way to collect papers about different topics and easily add them to writeups. The option to keep a bibtex bibliography updated in real time is especially helpful. All it takes to add a new source is a single click on Firefox and then just cite in latex/docs/word.
I used Zotero and their Chrome Extension when I was reading research papers. It automatically formatted citations, allowed me to add annotations and also locally saved any PDFs so I can access it quickly. You can also send different types of links such as videos, PDFs articles directly to Zotero.<p>I'd highly recommend it!
I used this to research and write what was essentially my thesis graduation requirement from law school in 2012. Good tool, I'm happy more people are finding out about it.<p>It's up there with calibre in terms of "meh" UI but just excellent functionality.
I'm using diigo for the same purpose. It seems to have similar features and more, especially easy tagging instead of having to deal with folders. Diigo also allows annotation, offline copies, search within text, export whole collection etc.
The magic import is great, but I wish it understood links from more sources, including <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.semanticscholar.org/</a>
I'm using Zotero with Yandex WebDav and it's pretty amazing. But there is no official iPad/mobile application. Are you planning to release a mobile application?
A college professor taught me about Zotero during my last semester. Awesome tool, but I wish I learned about it years before. I try and teach every student I meet about it.
No way I could have written so many papers in so little time in my undergrad Poli Sci major. (2005-2009)College without this would have been a bigger nightmare.
Zotero is a game changer. Citations have become the easiest part of writing and the tagging feature is incredibly useful when doing a systematic review.
I've been using Zotero for a few years and I really like it.<p>I'm using my own nextcloud storage to get more than the 300Mb free storage on zotero cloud.
It's shocking how many Git repos are used to build this project. It seems unnecessary. Personally I find the ability to make atomic commits across different parts of a project very handy. Don't understand the drive to break it into so many parts.