[HN Gopher] Zotero- Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize,...
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Zotero- Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and
share research
Author : rammy1234
Score : 96 points
Date : 2022-01-02 21:25 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zotero.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zotero.org)
| chana_masala wrote:
| I found Zotero very confusing to use. But maybe I am not the
| target demographic. I have always just used vim txt files for
| notes, using cli tools like grep to find what I need.
| mbreese wrote:
| It is very good for also downloading and keeping track of PDFs.
| It is primarily targeted at academics. And for many of us, it's
| a great tool for keeping track of what papers we are currently
| reading, or want to keep for later. It can be hard to manage
| citations, PDFs, etc... in a text document. I know some people
| do, but I like being able to use a bookmarklet/extension to add
| a new paper to my lists.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| To add to the other comment, Zotero can also download the PDF
| for you if you just have a citation (if it can find it) and it
| also integrates into Word, Google Docs, etc. for citations when
| writing research papers.
|
| It's especially useful for multiple people writing the same
| research paper as the library can be shared.
| prepend wrote:
| Generating the citation text in whatever format people like is
| a time saver.
| jabl wrote:
| I used to use Mendeley, but after the evil empire bought them out
| and added anti-features like preventing export of the DB (or
| something like that, I don't remember exactly what it was
| anymore), I switched to Zotero. I was on the verge of exiting
| academic research at the time, so I don't have as much experience
| of Zotero, but it seems very solid. Strongly recommended!
|
| (Occasionally I wonder about how Zotero development is going.
| IIRC they were planning to switch from XUL to Electron many years
| ago, maybe that plan got shelved or they just don't have the
| manpower to do it..)
| simlevesque wrote:
| I learned it in college and a month ago I was googling to
| remember this software and I found nothing. So thank you for
| posting this !!
| brainlessdev wrote:
| Zotero works with LibreOffice as well. It helped me tons while
| writing my thesis!
| temp8964 wrote:
| What I (and believe many others) really want is a self-hosted
| Zotero server. See question has been asked:
|
| https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/73721/zotero-self-hoste...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/zotero/comments/d270kv/zotero_datas...
|
| https://github.com/zotero/dataserver/issues/105
|
| https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/48335/foss-...
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/zotero-dev/c/9FdSz0kIG_4?pli=1
|
| Unfortunately, there is no officially supported way to do this.
| The official dataserver package does not have an instruction:
| https://github.com/zotero/dataserver
|
| There is an unofficial package from 5 years ago
| https://hub.docker.com/r/facciolo/zotero_dataserver-docker
| benjamir wrote:
| We tried to migrate a reference library with more than 17k
| entries, but it never worked out beyond 2k.
|
| Sorry to say: might be fine for small personal projects, for
| anything serious I don't see how.
| dstillman wrote:
| Something's not right there. People use Zotero with libraries
| with tens of thousands of items all the time. (Some people have
| hundreds of thousands of items, though that gets dicier.) Not
| sure exactly what you were seeing, but we'd be happy to debug
| in the Zotero Forums if you wanted to try again. It's possible
| to configure a third-party plugin such that it affects
| performance, for example.
|
| (Disclosure: Zotero dev)
| zoomablemind wrote:
| Isn't zotero backed by sqlite db? So these row counts are
| nothing much to cope with, sqlite would do just fine.
|
| Do you mean it did not work out for you performance-wise or the
| export process failed?
| wcerfgba wrote:
| What problems did you encounter with this large library?
| benjamir wrote:
| The import via API failed too often.
| chana_masala wrote:
| What were you trying to migrate from? And what do you use now?
| urschrei wrote:
| I've been using Zotero since it was in beta in 2007, and have a
| library with tens of thousands of items. As dstillman says
| that's hardly unusual. It works perfectly (it's just a SQLite
| db with a mature, well-designed schema after all), and syncs
| perfectly across five devices.
| benjamir wrote:
| Funny, we tried probably your solution for imports?
| urschrei/pyzotero is yours? Failed all the time. To be fair
| we got a lot of 5xx, so maybe we were just out of luck.
| Anyway time ran out with that project.
| designium wrote:
| I use Zotero as a bookmarking too. It saves the files and
| articles offline.
| wcerfgba wrote:
| Same!
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Is anyone using Zotero as a bookmark manager for articles to read
| later?
|
| I'd love to try it for this purpose!
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Yup, just install the browser addon and it works for this too.
| wosk wrote:
| I highly recommend going for the beta version which features a
| (game-changing) built-in pdf reader[1], with annotations
| (searchable and synced with the beta iPad app) and many more
| improvements.
|
| Zotero is an amazing tool and I could not imagine writing papers
| without it. For collaborative writing, it syncs the bibliography
| with overleaf[2] and google docs. The browser add-on allows to
| build your library with one click while browsing, and it parses
| wonderfully meta-data from all (most) publishers and pre-print
| servers.
|
| But I use it even for non-publishing side of research: one can
| save webpages (with snapshots) and write notes with formatting
| around them. My personal research workflow involves note-taking
| with the markdown app Zettlr[2], from which I can cite my Zotero
| library using simply `@[Author:Title:Year]`. I can then build
| notes from a twitter thread and stats.stackexchange.com answers,
| then connect it with papers and blog posts that way, and a
| specific chapter of a book with my annotation on the cloud. It
| not always straightforward as a workflow but it works wonders.
|
| And the team is very responsive on the forum and on twitter. If
| one of the dev is ready this, thank you so much for making
| researchers life way easier !
|
| EDIT: I just realised I can share my libraries online. A bit
| ashamed because it is very messy, but in case you are wondering
| what a Zotero library looks like, here is the link to mine [4]
| (without the notes and the embedded pdf and data files because I
| cannot share all of them. Moreover, I don't use the folder
| structure anymore so its very messy).
|
| [1] https://www.zotero.org/support/pdf_reader_preview
|
| [2] I recommend the BetterBibTex extension for anything related
| to tex, it'll save you a lot of time
|
| [3] https://zettlr.com, another great app.
|
| [4] https://www.zotero.org/wosk/library
| smitty1e wrote:
| I use Zotero to manage the research with:
|
| - the FireFox connector for ingest,
|
| - export to bibtex, and
|
| - the "Zoo for Zotero" app from the Play Store to pull the
| content down to a Samsung tablet for portable reading.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Zotero saved my life writing research papers. You can get all
| kinds of plugins to Sublime or Google Docs for adding citations.
| prepend wrote:
| I use zotero for managing research and bibliographies. But it's
| so weird that their web version (the only one I'll ever use)
| doesn't make it easy to share bibliographies with other people.
|
| It's such a weird feature that's missing and it really important
| when collaborating on a paper.
|
| It's free and better than the alternatives I've tried (endnote,
| mendeley, Google docs)
| wcerfgba wrote:
| You can edit your settings to make your web library publicly
| shareable :)
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