10 ms·

Zotero: Personal Research Assistant

945 points by supdatecron 6y ago

HorizonXP 6y ago
I used to use this almost 10+ years ago to organize my research during my masters. Love Zotero, glad to see it's still around!
reichardt 6y ago
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.
- xattt 6y ago
  Mendeley has this feature too. Their current desktop uses Qt. One of the other things going for Mendeley is seamless sync between an iPad and a desktop. Their cloud limit is 2GB free storage. Though Zotero has Zotfile, it’s a hassle to set up tablet sync with an iOS device.
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
My workflow is: 1. Come across paper pdf on the web. 2. Use Zotero firefox plugin to import it into Zotero. Zotero is able get citation data, and automatically exports it to a bib file. 3. Use emacs helm, which reads the bib file, to cite papers in my documents. 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.
- zneveu 6y ago
  Check out the "better bibtex" extension to zotero for exporting to bib files, I find it helps with unicode/utf-8 characters and might fix that alphabetical problem.
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    I am indeed using that. The bug reports claim it is a Zotero problem and not a better bibtex problem.
- tmalsburg2 6y ago
  Hi, helm-bibtex author here. Helm-bibtex has support for importing citations directly from CrossRef: Fire up helm-bitbex, type search terms (e.g., title of paper), select CrossRef option, select paper from search results and press "c" to copy BibTeX entry, "q" to close, then paste entry into your .bib file.
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    Thanks for the response. I am aware of that functionality. I, however, usually find papers using the browser (either searching google scholar or on arxiv/scirate). Zotero, then lets me click one button (most of the time), and the entry is available to be cited using a nice citekey (firstauthorYear), and the pdf is placed in my pdf folder with the right filename. With all due respect to the excellent work you do (many thanks for that), my workflow does not require any manual work most of the time.
    - tmalsburg2 6y ago
      I guess you have to manually export your bibliography, but, still, that's a pretty streamlined workflow. There's definitely room for improvements within Emacs.
      - BostonEnginerd 6y ago
        The BetterBibTeX plugin for zotero automatically keeps the BibTeX file in sync with the database.
- retorquere 6y ago
  That last thing is fixable. Open an issue on github for BBT and I'll get you sorted (heh)
djaque 6y ago
Easily one of the most useful programs I've installed for work. 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.
Cenk 6y ago
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. [1] https://citationstyles.org https://citationstyles.org
- ansible 6y ago
  From the link: > 9500 free CSL citation styles. Should I ask how it has come to be that there are 9500 citation styles? Or will it make me angry and depressed at the lack of cooperation and widely accepted standards?
  - ajot 6y ago
    I believe most of them are the same, but with a different name. So, for my convenience, I don't need to think what citation style a journal uses, I just go and download the citation style with its name, even if I have the same style installed for another journal.
    - retorquere 6y ago
      And most of such styles are so-called "substyles" -- if the master style they derive of changes, so do they.
  - jccalhoun 6y ago
    I would guess a lot of those are duplicates but there are also cases where it has like APA 4 styles and one for APA5, and APA6, and so on.
frodo3212 6y ago
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!
- bredren 6y ago
  Zotero's been around a while, I remember using it and its plugins many many years ago. Glad to see it is still kicking.
tobias2014 6y ago
I've used Mendeley Desktop for some time, which I believe is very similar in functionality (but proprietary, yes Elsevier!): https://www.mendeley.com/download-desktop-new/ https://www.mendeley.com/download-desktop-new/ Furthermore I think http://www.docear.org/ http://www.docear.org/ deserves to be mentioned as another free open-source solution with some interesting mind-mapping functionality: http://www.docear.org/software/screenshots/ http://www.docear.org/software/screenshots/
- djaque 6y ago
  I actually specifically chose Zotero over Mendeley because Mendeley is owned by Elsevier. Their company has always been a toxic influence on publishing. Recently they even added a new dark pattern so that when you click the "download PDF" button on their articles it opens up a web app reader loaded with tracking instead of just giving you a PDF. You then have to spend time and click through about three menus to really download the PDF. It's to the point that I avoid articles published by Elsevier if possible. Easier in my field than others I'm sure.
  - jabl 6y ago
    I used Mendeley to keep track of papers during my PhD. It was really a fantastic piece of software. Too bad they sold out to the dark side. After they were acquired, I switched to Zotero, but I wasn't doing active research anymore by then, so I don't have as much experience of using Zotero. On the surface it looks pretty good though.
  - Bedon292 6y ago
    I agree that Elsevier is toxic, and wish they didn't own Mendeley. Unfortunately, at least the last time I compared them, Mendeley was way better than Zotero for my personal use and just couldn't use Zotero. The cloud sync and sharing, the lit search, and all were just so much more compelling. I do think its been long enough I might poke at Zotero again and see if its caught up.
- bovine3dom 6y ago
  I reluctantly switched from Zotero to Mendeley as Mendeley has Android app that synchronises highlights, notes, read-progress etc. with the desktop version. It made reading papers on my tablet a delight.
HamSession 6y ago
Used Zotero with Firefox plugin and word plugin. Used to use Mendeley, but like the open source nature of Zotero.
dotdi 6y ago
Also chiming in to say I used Zotero for my Master's thesis and I was happy with it. 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. 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.
- pks016 6y ago
  Same here. I used it for my first Master's thesis(in biological sciences). I could not make Mendeley work with Word. Zotero works great for writing thesis and research paper with Word.
  - jszymborski 6y ago
    It also plays well with Latex :) There's a BibTeX output style that works really well.
- 131012 6y ago
  I highly recommend the zotfile plugin! In itself, this plugin made zotero more interesting than the competition.
  - MengerSponge 6y ago
    Zotfile + Better Bibtex is the ticket for me
    - boyband6666 6y ago
      I don't debate these make it better, but it doesn't seem like they should be required - most of the features are pretty standard!
      - retorquere 6y ago
generatorguy 6y ago
I've been using http://www.qiqqa.com/ http://www.qiqqa.com/ 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. 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. Highly recommend!
- SubiculumCode 6y ago
  So does Zotero.
  - generatorguy 6y ago
    great! good to have an alternative to qiqqa in case it disappears, although it looks like qiqqa has killed their cloud libraries and gone open source. I found qiqqa after google desktop was EOLed. I have been quick to recommend Qiqqa whenever it seems like it might be a useful tool but I never really saw those comments get much traction - maybe because everyone was already using zotero?
- dbancajas 6y ago
  is there anything like this but for blog posts and online links? please don't say pinboard
  - sytelus 6y ago
    Yes - try diigo.com. All my links + references lives there.
boromi 6y ago
Anyone else here who only uses Jabref?
- gtpedrosa 6y ago
  I've tried Mendeley, Zotero and Jabref and stuck with Jabref for my masters thesis. Couldn't recommend it enough, even though haven't given Zotero a serious try. Synced bibtex and pdfs folder in linux and windows with dropbox, worked like a charm.The best part was configuring it based on this blog post (http://griechenzicken.blogspot.com/2011/10/configuring-jabref-on-different.htm http://griechenzicken.blogspot.com/2011/10/configuring-jabre...) and making pdf links work on both machines. I wrote a blog post about why Jabref, but unfortunately it is in portuguese (https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/gerenciador-de-refer%C3%AAncias-bibliogr%C3%A1ficas-jabref/ https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/gerenciador-de-refer%C3%AAn...).
- alfla 6y ago
  used jabref myself a lot, mainly because it's easy to understand how it works (all state is in your .bib files). never really missed any features.
fjfaase 6y ago
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.
- jabl 6y ago
  The same people doing zotero have another project https://tropy.org/ https://tropy.org/ which might be what you're looking for? (Disclaimer: I haven't used tropy personally)
zneveu 6y ago
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.
bigbossman 6y ago
The problem with this (and Mendeley, Papers, Bibtex, etc.) is that each paper/thought is isolated. Roam Research (http://roamresearch.com/ http://roamresearch.com/) is my new jam.
- perchard 6y ago
  Roam is awesome but this and other reference management software serves a different purpose (for me, at least). I use BibDesk (like Zotero and other examples mentioned here) in conjunction with a plaintext (markdown) Zettelkasten[0]. BibDesk to save references (papers etc.) and copy formatted citations; which are then pasted into Zettels (c.f. a page in Roam). [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...
  - gpanders 6y ago
    I do this exact same thing! If I write a new Zettel that references something I read in a book (for example), all I do is get the ISBN of the book (usually off of Amazon), use Zotero's auto-import feature, copy the reference and paste it into my note. The whole thing takes all of ~20 seconds, it's very efficient. I know Zotero has a lot of other features, but 99% of my workflow with it is what I described above.
- bloopernova 6y ago
  I'm gently easing myself into the Roam knowledgebase management style by using Emacs+org-mode+org-roam. It's definitely one of those topics where you could spend a huge amount of energy organizing but not much actually doing :) Regarding roamresearch.com: How do you find yourself writing/organizing pages? Daily journal with a log of what you did first, then linking out from there? (don't feel pressured to write a novel in response, I don't want to steal time from your day!)
  - rollinDyno 6y ago
    What I do is just annotate absolutely everything. I try not to think much about structure. What matters is that my thoughts are put down into text. Structure and organization comes later. Once your second brain is searchable, you can quickly find those keywords and the context thanks to Roam bidirectional links. This is one way to approach your notes, when you know what you're looking for. Another way to approach your notes is by browsing. You can create a page with the structure or outline that you come up with, and then fill them with links to blocks in other notes. In here, you can practice a step of progressive summarization and rephrase your notes.
Kratisto 6y ago
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.
loughnane 6y ago
Was looking at this just yesterday. Anyone have success self-hosting this?
beckingz 6y ago
This would have been extremely helpful when writing my book.
jszymborski 6y ago
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). Here's an example from a talk I gave on Variational Autoencoders: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2350257/jszym_presentations/collections/GI7553H2 https://www.zotero.org/groups/2350257/jszym_presentations/co...
catchmeifyoucan 6y ago
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. I'd highly recommend it!
KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
Ahh darn I was hoping this would be an AI thing that collects and highlights research for you.
DamnInteresting 6y ago
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: https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-use-zotero-and-scrivener-for-research-driven-writing/ https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-use-zotero-and-scrivener-for-...
- tetris11 6y ago
  For the cloud side, there was a nice tool for linking a Google Drive full of PDFs with entries in your Zotero database, bypassing the cloud storage limits. https://github.com/mtekman/ZoteroGoogleDrive-PDFLinker-Cloud https://github.com/mtekman/ZoteroGoogleDrive-PDFLinker-Cloud
Flockster 6y ago
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.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  Pretty sure I'm the author of the plugin you're talking about :) I did a few updates recently, but I welcome any additions/PRs anyone wants to send.
  - Flockster 6y ago
    Yes you are, thank you very much!
  - rollinDyno 6y ago
    Can you please link to your plugin?
    - ethanwillis 6y ago
      https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub/ https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub/ Here you go!
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    You are amazing and have saved me so much time. Thank you so much.
SubiculumCode 6y ago
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. 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.
dang 6y ago
A thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606929 A little bit from 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319975 Related from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18977461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18977461 (Links are for the curious. Reposts are fine after a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
osrec 6y ago
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?
- OJFord 6y ago
  I haven't used it in a couple of years, but then it seemed to be using Qt/GTK/something. I believe there is a browser extension too, but the main program is (was) a non-electron stand-alone deal.
- gmac 6y ago
  It's XUL. It used to be a Firefox extension, before Firefox changed how those work.
mooneater 6y ago
The magic import is great, but I wish it understood links from more sources, including https://www.semanticscholar.org/ https://www.semanticscholar.org/
metreo 6y ago
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.
mcshicks 6y ago
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. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/defeating-bedlam/?searchResultPosition=1 https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/defeating-b... 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! 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.
mncharity 6y ago
Zotero phones home with perhaps more information than you expect.[1] 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. I enjoyed using it, but their approach to privacy felt creepy. That [1] is somewhat improved... but only somewhat. [1] https://www.zotero.org/support/privacy#disabling_automatic_requests https://www.zotero.org/support/privacy#disabling_automatic_r...
- rikelmens 6y ago
  It's an open source project. Feel free to fork it and remove parts you dislike.
  - hu3 6y ago
    OP's criticism were fair enough to not deserve a dismissive response. I for one am thankful for their warnings.
    - pergadad 6y ago
      See the response by the developer and the actual page linked. It seems op didn't actually read the link he posted and the critique was fully incorrect.
    - thoraway1010 6y ago
      Their warnings are wrong.
- dstillman 6y ago
  (Disclosure: Zotero developer) Criticizing Zotero for privacy, of all things, is a bit bizarre. Zotero is an open-source project from a nonprofit organization with no financial interest in people's research data. It's designed as a local tool specifically to give people complete control over their data, and it's developed in the open. Most similar tools are proprietary programs owned by major publishers or analytics companies with voracious appetites for data. The page you linked to explains the reasons for every single network connection that Zotero makes and how to disable it. Every one enables a specific Zotero feature — push-based auto-sync, fast translator updates as sites change to minimize save failures, open-access PDF retrieval. When we implemented retraction notifications, we even did it using k-anonymity to avoid sending up library data from people who don't use syncing. We're always happy to discuss design decisions in our forums, but I'd argue pretty strongly that privacy is one of the main reasons one should use Zotero, not the other way around.
gmac 6y ago
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]. :( [1] http://mackerron.com/zot2bib/ http://mackerron.com/zot2bib/ [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zotero-dev/a1IPUJ2m_3s https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zotero-dev/a1IPUJ2m_...
richclominson 6y ago
This is so cool! Any plans for working on an iPhone/iPad app?
- MengerSponge 6y ago
  For a version 1,2,3, etc., it doesn't need to display annotations or notes. Just a local browser for my library with tags would make my life far better. ps- fellow iPad user: check out Liquid Text. It's the bee's knees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akEMuL4_9sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akEMuL4_9sk
bitcuration 6y ago
It'd be interesting if someone can compare it to Evernote.
- jccalhoun 6y ago
  I don't think it is similar at all. I haven't used evernote but it is for notes and things right? This is just for citations.
lala26in 6y ago
Zotero desktop GUI is not top notch. Feels like they stopped improving things in a long time. I'd rank the GUI experience this way: Paperpile > Zotero >= Mendeley
mfsch 6y ago
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. 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.
mrks_ 6y ago
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.
- djaque 6y ago
  It ended up being the perfect solution for storing manuals and other random information for me. It's lightweight enough to not get in my way but still syncs everywhere and is searchable. There's even a third party app I can use on my phone if I need quick access to PDFs.
- boyband6666 6y ago
  As well as academic papers, I use it for storing copies (wiut hthe chrome plugin) of websites - things are not permanent these days and may reference sources I wouldn't want to lose! It's basically my personal library
jccalhoun 6y ago
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.
memming 6y ago
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.
- dstillman 6y ago
  Ask your colleagues to use the Better BibTeX plugin for Zotero, which includes vastly better support for BibTeX-based workflows. Zotero's built-in BibTeX export is mostly intended as a generic data transfer format to other similar tools. It could surely be improved, and we'd be happy for patches, but contributions tend to go to Better BibTeX, since that's what people who care about BibTeX are using. (Zotero will export ASCII BibTeX if you choose "Western" instead of "Unicode" for the export charset, though.) (Disclosure: Zotero developer)
- sytelus 6y ago
  This. The paper I want to cite, I actually make an effort to go to its author's website and grab bib from there. That's the only definitive source of how the author wants to be cited. Grabbing bib from automated tools has created bib hell that we rely upon Google Scholar to clean up via fuzzy matching which screws up things quite often.
  - retorquere 6y ago
    That works if it's the author itself, and the author has at least a passing familiarity with BibTeX. Much of the bibtex that you can download from journal cites is itself pretty botched up.
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
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.
- dstillman 6y ago
  Mostly historical. Zotero began as a Firefox extension, with separate Firefox extensions for the word processor plugins, and later added a standalone app that used the same codebase. Since Firefox discontinued support for XUL extensions, there's only a standalone app and the lightweight browser extensions now, but we haven't gotten around to merging the various build repos. We know it can be a pain to build, though, so streamlining this is planned. But it's also just a huge ecosystem with parts that are used and developed independently. E.g., "translators" for save/import/export are used in both Zotero and in the Node-based translation-server (used by Wikipedia and others), and we can give commit access to those separately from the core code. (Disclosure: Zotero developer)
pkilgore 6y ago
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. It's up there with calibre in terms of "meh" UI but just excellent functionality.
ohbleek 6y ago
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.
ntnsndr 6y ago
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. 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.
egberts1 6y ago
No private storage repository support?
autocorr 6y ago
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: * free software * Linux and multi-platform support * 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) * shared group libraries for collaboration with students * offline only as well as sync * the ability to add notes, tags, and relational links between items. 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. 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.
- jMyles 6y ago
  Did you mean to leave a footnote to Luhmann's Zettelkasten system? I had never heard of it, but I found this article about it: https://medium.com/emvi/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-tool-that-works-like-your-brain-abe2d53a2948 https://medium.com/emvi/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity...
  - luroc 6y ago
    The book 'how to write smart notes' is a great writeup un that topic. This post is quite good aswell: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...
fatihbaltaci 6y ago
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?
Woetoewoetoe 6y ago
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.
- meej 6y ago
  One good habit is to never import using the browser plugins until the page is fully loaded. Otherwise, papers often get imported as web pages with no PDF attachments.
stared 6y ago
Just curious, what is Zotero's business model (as open-source software for academicians)? It's most direct competition, Mendeley, has always been closed-source, and then got acquired by Elsevier. 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.
- montalbano 6y ago
  I pay them for cloud storage so that all my books + papers are backed up and synchronised between my computers. The free storage is pretty generous but I exceeded it after about 6 months of use.
- dstillman 6y ago
  Early versions were grant funded, but the project has been fully supported by storage subscriptions — including institutional subscriptions — for years. (Lots of invaluable volunteer work as well, but there's a paid dev team.)
  - forgotMyAccName 6y ago
    I'd be interested to learn more about Zotero's history and whole space. Do you mind if I reach out to you with more questions? Email's on my profile :)
RMPR 6y ago
I use it to write my master thesis, for my not so conventional setup, (using markdown and pandoc) I find that it integrates nicely.
boyband6666 6y ago
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? 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 :-)
- meej 6y ago
  EndNote Libraries shouldn't be stored in the cloud, either, for the same reason. See the "General Safety Notes" at http://clarivate.libguides.com/endnote_training/home http://clarivate.libguides.com/endnote_training/home Also, Zotero just revamped the Web Library interface. Check it out, it's very nice.
- radus 6y ago
  Sync your metadata with Zotero but the files in the cloud - you just need to make sure your settings are compatible between machines (storage locations etc).
  - boyband6666 6y ago
    That's what I do, but it took a while to get there. Since I would say 80% of people have some level of cloud storage now (University, employer, personal), there should be a simple setting to pick one, and the location. Make it easy for people and win users!
superlopuh 6y ago
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.
elcomet 6y ago
I've been using Zotero for a few years and I really like it. I'm using my own nextcloud storage to get more than the 300Mb free storage on zotero cloud.
kingbirdy 6y ago
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.
- ar-jan 6y ago
  Juris-M, a friendly fork of Zotero supporting legal referencing (https://juris-m.github.io/ https://juris-m.github.io/).
faitswulff 6y ago
While Zotero is great, I'm a bit confused as to why this is #1 on hackernews right now? Is this a new version of Zotero?
andreshb 6y ago
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.
itqwertz 6y ago
Is there a WordPress plug-in?
ghego1 6y ago
Happy to see Zotero here, I use it on a daily basis and I couldn't love it more. Thanks to the developers!
sytelus 6y ago
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.
andrewSC 6y ago
If you like Zotero, Dataverse[0][1][2] might be appealing as well! [0] https://dataverse.org/ https://dataverse.org/ [1] https://dataverse.org/software-features https://dataverse.org/software-features [2] https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse
colonelchlorine 6y ago
Loved Zotero in my undergrad at UWaterloo for nano degree. This was over 10 years ago, so it's good to see it's still popular.
marcel-me 6y ago
Does anybody have a good workflow syncing Kindle notes with Zotero?

945 points by supdatecron 6y ago

I used to use this almost 10+ years ago to organize my research during my masters. Love Zotero, glad to see it's still around!

reichardt 6y ago

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.

xattt 6y ago
Mendeley has this feature too. Their current desktop uses Qt. One of the other things going for Mendeley is seamless sync between an iPad and a desktop. Their cloud limit is 2GB free storage. Though Zotero has Zotfile, it’s a hassle to set up tablet sync with an iOS device.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago

My workflow is: 1. Come across paper pdf on the web. 2. Use Zotero firefox plugin to import it into Zotero. Zotero is able get citation data, and automatically exports it to a bib file. 3. Use emacs helm, which reads the bib file, to cite papers in my documents. 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.

zneveu 6y ago
Check out the "better bibtex" extension to zotero for exporting to bib files, I find it helps with unicode/utf-8 characters and might fix that alphabetical problem.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  I am indeed using that. The bug reports claim it is a Zotero problem and not a better bibtex problem.
tmalsburg2 6y ago
Hi, helm-bibtex author here. Helm-bibtex has support for importing citations directly from CrossRef: Fire up helm-bitbex, type search terms (e.g., title of paper), select CrossRef option, select paper from search results and press "c" to copy BibTeX entry, "q" to close, then paste entry into your .bib file.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  Thanks for the response. I am aware of that functionality. I, however, usually find papers using the browser (either searching google scholar or on arxiv/scirate). Zotero, then lets me click one button (most of the time), and the entry is available to be cited using a nice citekey (firstauthorYear), and the pdf is placed in my pdf folder with the right filename. With all due respect to the excellent work you do (many thanks for that), my workflow does not require any manual work most of the time.
  - tmalsburg2 6y ago
    I guess you have to manually export your bibliography, but, still, that's a pretty streamlined workflow. There's definitely room for improvements within Emacs.
    - BostonEnginerd 6y ago
      The BetterBibTeX plugin for zotero automatically keeps the BibTeX file in sync with the database.
retorquere 6y ago
That last thing is fixable. Open an issue on github for BBT and I'll get you sorted (heh)

djaque 6y ago

Easily one of the most useful programs I've installed for work. 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.

Cenk 6y ago

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. [1] https://citationstyles.org https://citationstyles.org

ansible 6y ago
From the link: > 9500 free CSL citation styles. Should I ask how it has come to be that there are 9500 citation styles? Or will it make me angry and depressed at the lack of cooperation and widely accepted standards?
- ajot 6y ago
  I believe most of them are the same, but with a different name. So, for my convenience, I don't need to think what citation style a journal uses, I just go and download the citation style with its name, even if I have the same style installed for another journal.
  - retorquere 6y ago
    And most of such styles are so-called "substyles" -- if the master style they derive of changes, so do they.
- jccalhoun 6y ago
  I would guess a lot of those are duplicates but there are also cases where it has like APA 4 styles and one for APA5, and APA6, and so on.

frodo3212 6y ago

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!

bredren 6y ago
Zotero's been around a while, I remember using it and its plugins many many years ago. Glad to see it is still kicking.

tobias2014 6y ago

I've used Mendeley Desktop for some time, which I believe is very similar in functionality (but proprietary, yes Elsevier!): https://www.mendeley.com/download-desktop-new/ https://www.mendeley.com/download-desktop-new/ Furthermore I think http://www.docear.org/ http://www.docear.org/ deserves to be mentioned as another free open-source solution with some interesting mind-mapping functionality: http://www.docear.org/software/screenshots/ http://www.docear.org/software/screenshots/

djaque 6y ago
I actually specifically chose Zotero over Mendeley because Mendeley is owned by Elsevier. Their company has always been a toxic influence on publishing. Recently they even added a new dark pattern so that when you click the "download PDF" button on their articles it opens up a web app reader loaded with tracking instead of just giving you a PDF. You then have to spend time and click through about three menus to really download the PDF. It's to the point that I avoid articles published by Elsevier if possible. Easier in my field than others I'm sure.
- jabl 6y ago
  I used Mendeley to keep track of papers during my PhD. It was really a fantastic piece of software. Too bad they sold out to the dark side. After they were acquired, I switched to Zotero, but I wasn't doing active research anymore by then, so I don't have as much experience of using Zotero. On the surface it looks pretty good though.
- Bedon292 6y ago
  I agree that Elsevier is toxic, and wish they didn't own Mendeley. Unfortunately, at least the last time I compared them, Mendeley was way better than Zotero for my personal use and just couldn't use Zotero. The cloud sync and sharing, the lit search, and all were just so much more compelling. I do think its been long enough I might poke at Zotero again and see if its caught up.
bovine3dom 6y ago
I reluctantly switched from Zotero to Mendeley as Mendeley has Android app that synchronises highlights, notes, read-progress etc. with the desktop version. It made reading papers on my tablet a delight.

HamSession 6y ago

Used Zotero with Firefox plugin and word plugin. Used to use Mendeley, but like the open source nature of Zotero.

dotdi 6y ago

Also chiming in to say I used Zotero for my Master's thesis and I was happy with it. 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. 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.

pks016 6y ago
Same here. I used it for my first Master's thesis(in biological sciences). I could not make Mendeley work with Word. Zotero works great for writing thesis and research paper with Word.
- jszymborski 6y ago
  It also plays well with Latex :) There's a BibTeX output style that works really well.
131012 6y ago
I highly recommend the zotfile plugin! In itself, this plugin made zotero more interesting than the competition.
- MengerSponge 6y ago
  Zotfile + Better Bibtex is the ticket for me
  - boyband6666 6y ago
    I don't debate these make it better, but it doesn't seem like they should be required - most of the features are pretty standard!
    - retorquere 6y ago

generatorguy 6y ago

I've been using http://www.qiqqa.com/ http://www.qiqqa.com/ 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. 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. Highly recommend!

SubiculumCode 6y ago
So does Zotero.
- generatorguy 6y ago
  great! good to have an alternative to qiqqa in case it disappears, although it looks like qiqqa has killed their cloud libraries and gone open source. I found qiqqa after google desktop was EOLed. I have been quick to recommend Qiqqa whenever it seems like it might be a useful tool but I never really saw those comments get much traction - maybe because everyone was already using zotero?
dbancajas 6y ago
is there anything like this but for blog posts and online links? please don't say pinboard
- sytelus 6y ago
  Yes - try diigo.com. All my links + references lives there.

boromi 6y ago

Anyone else here who only uses Jabref?

gtpedrosa 6y ago
I've tried Mendeley, Zotero and Jabref and stuck with Jabref for my masters thesis. Couldn't recommend it enough, even though haven't given Zotero a serious try. Synced bibtex and pdfs folder in linux and windows with dropbox, worked like a charm.The best part was configuring it based on this blog post (http://griechenzicken.blogspot.com/2011/10/configuring-jabref-on-different.htm http://griechenzicken.blogspot.com/2011/10/configuring-jabre...) and making pdf links work on both machines. I wrote a blog post about why Jabref, but unfortunately it is in portuguese (https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/gerenciador-de-refer%C3%AAncias-bibliogr%C3%A1ficas-jabref/ https://gtpedrosa.github.io/blog/gerenciador-de-refer%C3%AAn...).
alfla 6y ago
used jabref myself a lot, mainly because it's easy to understand how it works (all state is in your .bib files). never really missed any features.

fjfaase 6y ago

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.

jabl 6y ago
The same people doing zotero have another project https://tropy.org/ https://tropy.org/ which might be what you're looking for? (Disclaimer: I haven't used tropy personally)

zneveu 6y ago

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.

bigbossman 6y ago

The problem with this (and Mendeley, Papers, Bibtex, etc.) is that each paper/thought is isolated. Roam Research (http://roamresearch.com/ http://roamresearch.com/) is my new jam.

perchard 6y ago
Roam is awesome but this and other reference management software serves a different purpose (for me, at least). I use BibDesk (like Zotero and other examples mentioned here) in conjunction with a plaintext (markdown) Zettelkasten[0]. BibDesk to save references (papers etc.) and copy formatted citations; which are then pasted into Zettels (c.f. a page in Roam). [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...
- gpanders 6y ago
  I do this exact same thing! If I write a new Zettel that references something I read in a book (for example), all I do is get the ISBN of the book (usually off of Amazon), use Zotero's auto-import feature, copy the reference and paste it into my note. The whole thing takes all of ~20 seconds, it's very efficient. I know Zotero has a lot of other features, but 99% of my workflow with it is what I described above.
bloopernova 6y ago
I'm gently easing myself into the Roam knowledgebase management style by using Emacs+org-mode+org-roam. It's definitely one of those topics where you could spend a huge amount of energy organizing but not much actually doing :) Regarding roamresearch.com: How do you find yourself writing/organizing pages? Daily journal with a log of what you did first, then linking out from there? (don't feel pressured to write a novel in response, I don't want to steal time from your day!)
- rollinDyno 6y ago
  What I do is just annotate absolutely everything. I try not to think much about structure. What matters is that my thoughts are put down into text. Structure and organization comes later. Once your second brain is searchable, you can quickly find those keywords and the context thanks to Roam bidirectional links. This is one way to approach your notes, when you know what you're looking for. Another way to approach your notes is by browsing. You can create a page with the structure or outline that you come up with, and then fill them with links to blocks in other notes. In here, you can practice a step of progressive summarization and rephrase your notes.

Kratisto 6y ago

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.

loughnane 6y ago

Was looking at this just yesterday. Anyone have success self-hosting this?

beckingz 6y ago

This would have been extremely helpful when writing my book.

jszymborski 6y ago

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). Here's an example from a talk I gave on Variational Autoencoders: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2350257/jszym_presentations/collections/GI7553H2 https://www.zotero.org/groups/2350257/jszym_presentations/co...

catchmeifyoucan 6y ago

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. I'd highly recommend it!

KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago

Ahh darn I was hoping this would be an AI thing that collects and highlights research for you.

DamnInteresting 6y ago

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: https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-use-zotero-and-scrivener-for-research-driven-writing/ https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-use-zotero-and-scrivener-for-...

tetris11 6y ago
For the cloud side, there was a nice tool for linking a Google Drive full of PDFs with entries in your Zotero database, bypassing the cloud storage limits. https://github.com/mtekman/ZoteroGoogleDrive-PDFLinker-Cloud https://github.com/mtekman/ZoteroGoogleDrive-PDFLinker-Cloud

Flockster 6y ago

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.

ethanwillis 6y ago
Pretty sure I'm the author of the plugin you're talking about :) I did a few updates recently, but I welcome any additions/PRs anyone wants to send.
- Flockster 6y ago
  Yes you are, thank you very much!
- rollinDyno 6y ago
  Can you please link to your plugin?
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub/ https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub/ Here you go!
- qdot76367 6y ago
  You are amazing and have saved me so much time. Thank you so much.

SubiculumCode 6y ago

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. 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.

dang 6y ago

A thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606929 A little bit from 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319975 Related from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18977461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18977461 (Links are for the curious. Reposts are fine after a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

osrec 6y ago

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?

OJFord 6y ago
I haven't used it in a couple of years, but then it seemed to be using Qt/GTK/something. I believe there is a browser extension too, but the main program is (was) a non-electron stand-alone deal.
gmac 6y ago
It's XUL. It used to be a Firefox extension, before Firefox changed how those work.

mooneater 6y ago

The magic import is great, but I wish it understood links from more sources, including https://www.semanticscholar.org/ https://www.semanticscholar.org/

metreo 6y ago

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.

mcshicks 6y ago

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. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/defeating-bedlam/?searchResultPosition=1 https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/defeating-b... 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! 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.

mncharity 6y ago

Zotero phones home with perhaps more information than you expect.[1] 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. I enjoyed using it, but their approach to privacy felt creepy. That [1] is somewhat improved... but only somewhat. [1] https://www.zotero.org/support/privacy#disabling_automatic_requests https://www.zotero.org/support/privacy#disabling_automatic_r...

rikelmens 6y ago
It's an open source project. Feel free to fork it and remove parts you dislike.
- hu3 6y ago
  OP's criticism were fair enough to not deserve a dismissive response. I for one am thankful for their warnings.
  - pergadad 6y ago
    See the response by the developer and the actual page linked. It seems op didn't actually read the link he posted and the critique was fully incorrect.
  - thoraway1010 6y ago
    Their warnings are wrong.
dstillman 6y ago
(Disclosure: Zotero developer) Criticizing Zotero for privacy, of all things, is a bit bizarre. Zotero is an open-source project from a nonprofit organization with no financial interest in people's research data. It's designed as a local tool specifically to give people complete control over their data, and it's developed in the open. Most similar tools are proprietary programs owned by major publishers or analytics companies with voracious appetites for data. The page you linked to explains the reasons for every single network connection that Zotero makes and how to disable it. Every one enables a specific Zotero feature — push-based auto-sync, fast translator updates as sites change to minimize save failures, open-access PDF retrieval. When we implemented retraction notifications, we even did it using k-anonymity to avoid sending up library data from people who don't use syncing. We're always happy to discuss design decisions in our forums, but I'd argue pretty strongly that privacy is one of the main reasons one should use Zotero, not the other way around.

gmac 6y ago

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]. :( [1] http://mackerron.com/zot2bib/ http://mackerron.com/zot2bib/ [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zotero-dev/a1IPUJ2m_3s https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zotero-dev/a1IPUJ2m_...

richclominson 6y ago

This is so cool! Any plans for working on an iPhone/iPad app?

MengerSponge 6y ago
For a version 1,2,3, etc., it doesn't need to display annotations or notes. Just a local browser for my library with tags would make my life far better. ps- fellow iPad user: check out Liquid Text. It's the bee's knees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akEMuL4_9sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akEMuL4_9sk

bitcuration 6y ago

It'd be interesting if someone can compare it to Evernote.

jccalhoun 6y ago
I don't think it is similar at all. I haven't used evernote but it is for notes and things right? This is just for citations.

lala26in 6y ago

Zotero desktop GUI is not top notch. Feels like they stopped improving things in a long time. I'd rank the GUI experience this way: Paperpile > Zotero >= Mendeley

mfsch 6y ago

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. 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.

mrks_ 6y ago

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.

djaque 6y ago
It ended up being the perfect solution for storing manuals and other random information for me. It's lightweight enough to not get in my way but still syncs everywhere and is searchable. There's even a third party app I can use on my phone if I need quick access to PDFs.
boyband6666 6y ago
As well as academic papers, I use it for storing copies (wiut hthe chrome plugin) of websites - things are not permanent these days and may reference sources I wouldn't want to lose! It's basically my personal library

jccalhoun 6y ago

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.

memming 6y ago

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.

dstillman 6y ago
Ask your colleagues to use the Better BibTeX plugin for Zotero, which includes vastly better support for BibTeX-based workflows. Zotero's built-in BibTeX export is mostly intended as a generic data transfer format to other similar tools. It could surely be improved, and we'd be happy for patches, but contributions tend to go to Better BibTeX, since that's what people who care about BibTeX are using. (Zotero will export ASCII BibTeX if you choose "Western" instead of "Unicode" for the export charset, though.) (Disclosure: Zotero developer)
sytelus 6y ago
This. The paper I want to cite, I actually make an effort to go to its author's website and grab bib from there. That's the only definitive source of how the author wants to be cited. Grabbing bib from automated tools has created bib hell that we rely upon Google Scholar to clean up via fuzzy matching which screws up things quite often.
- retorquere 6y ago
  That works if it's the author itself, and the author has at least a passing familiarity with BibTeX. Much of the bibtex that you can download from journal cites is itself pretty botched up.

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago

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.

dstillman 6y ago
Mostly historical. Zotero began as a Firefox extension, with separate Firefox extensions for the word processor plugins, and later added a standalone app that used the same codebase. Since Firefox discontinued support for XUL extensions, there's only a standalone app and the lightweight browser extensions now, but we haven't gotten around to merging the various build repos. We know it can be a pain to build, though, so streamlining this is planned. But it's also just a huge ecosystem with parts that are used and developed independently. E.g., "translators" for save/import/export are used in both Zotero and in the Node-based translation-server (used by Wikipedia and others), and we can give commit access to those separately from the core code. (Disclosure: Zotero developer)

pkilgore 6y ago

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. It's up there with calibre in terms of "meh" UI but just excellent functionality.

ohbleek 6y ago

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.

ntnsndr 6y ago

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. 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.

egberts1 6y ago

No private storage repository support?

autocorr 6y ago

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: * free software * Linux and multi-platform support * 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) * shared group libraries for collaboration with students * offline only as well as sync * the ability to add notes, tags, and relational links between items. 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. 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.

jMyles 6y ago
Did you mean to leave a footnote to Luhmann's Zettelkasten system? I had never heard of it, but I found this article about it: https://medium.com/emvi/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-tool-that-works-like-your-brain-abe2d53a2948 https://medium.com/emvi/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity...
- luroc 6y ago
  The book 'how to write smart notes' is a great writeup un that topic. This post is quite good aswell: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...

fatihbaltaci 6y ago

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?

Woetoewoetoe 6y ago

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.

meej 6y ago
One good habit is to never import using the browser plugins until the page is fully loaded. Otherwise, papers often get imported as web pages with no PDF attachments.

stared 6y ago

Just curious, what is Zotero's business model (as open-source software for academicians)? It's most direct competition, Mendeley, has always been closed-source, and then got acquired by Elsevier. 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.

montalbano 6y ago
I pay them for cloud storage so that all my books + papers are backed up and synchronised between my computers. The free storage is pretty generous but I exceeded it after about 6 months of use.
dstillman 6y ago
Early versions were grant funded, but the project has been fully supported by storage subscriptions — including institutional subscriptions — for years. (Lots of invaluable volunteer work as well, but there's a paid dev team.)
- forgotMyAccName 6y ago
  I'd be interested to learn more about Zotero's history and whole space. Do you mind if I reach out to you with more questions? Email's on my profile :)

RMPR 6y ago

I use it to write my master thesis, for my not so conventional setup, (using markdown and pandoc) I find that it integrates nicely.

boyband6666 6y ago

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? 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 :-)

meej 6y ago
EndNote Libraries shouldn't be stored in the cloud, either, for the same reason. See the "General Safety Notes" at http://clarivate.libguides.com/endnote_training/home http://clarivate.libguides.com/endnote_training/home Also, Zotero just revamped the Web Library interface. Check it out, it's very nice.
radus 6y ago
Sync your metadata with Zotero but the files in the cloud - you just need to make sure your settings are compatible between machines (storage locations etc).
- boyband6666 6y ago
  That's what I do, but it took a while to get there. Since I would say 80% of people have some level of cloud storage now (University, employer, personal), there should be a simple setting to pick one, and the location. Make it easy for people and win users!

superlopuh 6y ago

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.

elcomet 6y ago

I've been using Zotero for a few years and I really like it. I'm using my own nextcloud storage to get more than the 300Mb free storage on zotero cloud.

kingbirdy 6y ago

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.

ar-jan 6y ago
Juris-M, a friendly fork of Zotero supporting legal referencing (https://juris-m.github.io/ https://juris-m.github.io/).

faitswulff 6y ago

While Zotero is great, I'm a bit confused as to why this is #1 on hackernews right now? Is this a new version of Zotero?

andreshb 6y ago

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.

itqwertz 6y ago

Is there a WordPress plug-in?

ghego1 6y ago

Happy to see Zotero here, I use it on a daily basis and I couldn't love it more. Thanks to the developers!

sytelus 6y ago

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.

andrewSC 6y ago

If you like Zotero, Dataverse[0][1][2] might be appealing as well! [0] https://dataverse.org/ https://dataverse.org/ [1] https://dataverse.org/software-features https://dataverse.org/software-features [2] https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse

colonelchlorine 6y ago

Loved Zotero in my undergrad at UWaterloo for nano degree. This was over 10 years ago, so it's good to see it's still popular.

marcel-me 6y ago

Does anybody have a good workflow syncing Kindle notes with Zotero?