10 ms·

Zotero 8

245 points by bouchard 8mo ago

dhash 8mo ago
Post Mendeley shutdown, zotero has been an awesome replacement (while not being controlled by Elsevier). Given the amount of PDF's that I see during researchy times in my life, it's been an absolute godsend. Highly reccommend!
- angry_octet 8mo ago
  Zotero is the best. However, if your brain is highly tuned to use Mendeley Desktop, note that they backed down on killing it, they just won't add new features (where that leaves security updates I'm not sure). https://blog.mendeley.com/2025/07/09/mendeley-is-not-going-anywhere/ https://blog.mendeley.com/2025/07/09/mendeley-is-not-going-a...
Tomte 8mo ago
I‘ve been using it as a general bookmark manager (think Pinboard or Raindrop) for a while now. It‘s a bit quirky, but very powerful with all the management and annotation possibilities. You might say it was just another excuse to curate my thousands of bookmarks and recreate a new tagging structure yet again, but… well, you wouldn‘t be wrong. :-)
dakiol 8mo ago
I've been using Zotero as my "book" organizer. I have all my epubs, pdfs, everything there. Since version 7 I think you can read PDFs within Zotero, and I love it. I keep custom labels so I easily search for stuff. The only feature I don't use is everything about citation (funny enough). Before Zotero I had everything in file system directories, but I wanted the feeling of having one place (one app) where I could see all my books by category, by read/no-read, etc. Having said this, I will probably wait a bit before upgrading to V8 (since I use it everyday, so I wouldn't like to face bugs and the like)
- itsrobreally 8mo ago
  My experience with Zotero was similar - I tried adding my ebook library to it as an alternative to Calibre because I really want to sort of categorize and easily reference my books and/or get like library call number groupings which is not trivial with Calibre. I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre. Someday I will write an indexer with either a web search tool or an LLM interface to better find info on my books but for now I just spend too much time browsing through the files which makes me sad (but not sad enough yet to overcome the laziness)
  - pessimizer 8mo ago
    > I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre. Just find the citation on the web like at Open Library or somewhere, grab it, and add the book as an attachment. I wouldn't drop it because all the stuff may not be done automatically. If you're going to read the books, you should be spending hours with them. I myself only put them into Zotero when I start reading them. I don't need to crowd it with wishful thinking. It's bloated and gets slower the more entries you add.
majkinetor 8mo ago
Zotero is very good nowadays. Its unbearably slow though, and it doesn't seem this will ever get better.
- mft_ 8mo ago
  Could you share how/when it is slow? We’re considering using this at work and I’d love your feedback.
  - austinjp 8mo ago
    Not OP and this is mere anecdata, but on a modest several-years-old ThinkPad, Zotero was slow when my single collection started pushing over 1,000 papers, most of which had PDFs attached. Starting up would take many seconds (half a minute?) and heavy operations such as bulk-renaming would take minutes. But for day-to-day use (adding references to my collection via a browser plugin) it was fine. Personally, I used auto-export for all additional functionality. So, I didn't use any Word (LibreOffice) plugins that hooked into Zotero or whatever. I'd just consume a giant .bib file as and when necessary. On modern hardware Zotero is probably fine. And it's reasonably flexible. A suggestion: export/import a big refs file (plus PDF attachments) and see if it can handle your daily workload. I suspect it will.
kstrauser 8mo ago
My kid was talking about all the papers they had to cite in their college class. I started to suggest that they check out Zotero, but they stopped me to explain that their teachers already had them all using it. Thank you for getting the kids started off on the right foot, professor!
throwaway_24242 8mo ago
[dead]
- ifh-hn 8mo ago
  Im unaware of another open source tool that provides all zotero does that's lighter weight. I can guarantee it's better than using text files on disk.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mxuribe 8mo ago
    Hi @ifh-hn , would you mind sharing what features you feel might make zotero better than text files on a disk? I'm genuinely interested to learn. I've heard of zotero maybe a year or so ago, and was curious about it, but never took the plunge. I manage the bulk of my info/knowledge base across mostly locally-saved text files, with a few other tidbits leveraging PDFs and word process files (.odt, .docx)...and really i only use the latter for pasting in screenshots. And, then of course simply synching them across devices using syncthing. While my approach works great for the majority of the time, i can imagine there might be some functions that some other tools might bring me which i might be missing...I suppose one thing that i lack is a graph of linkages for content that might live in different, separate files but might be related, etc. So, would you be willing to share your opinion, experience for what makes zotero better than text files on a disk? :-) Thanks!
    - ifh-hn 8mo ago
      I use it in an academic sense. I use it browser plugin to one click capture a source. Zotero mostly automatically identifies the source type, author, and other metadata. It can retrieve metadata directly from files like pdfs too. Further it has ability to retrieve metadata from ISBN, doi, and other identifiers. It can export these sources to really any citation style and also integrates with other software for this purpose. It has a plugin system for extras too. I have nothing against text files on the disk but zotero is simply much better as a knowledge/source manager.
malshe 8mo ago
If you use Zotero regularly and can afford it, please consider becoming a paying member. https://www.zotero.org/getinvolved https://www.zotero.org/getinvolved
whimsicalism 8mo ago
I highly recommend everyone to use Zotero. Their original marketing as being 'for academics' is entirely wrong and it is a first-in-class bookmark/knowledge manager. There are many software recommendations that seem sort of hype-y: Obsidian, Notion, Keybase, etc. Zotero is not that and is a daily driver for me for years. It has also replaced Calibre for me although YMMV there.
- kens 8mo ago
  I second the recommendation for Zotero, especially if you find yourself buried under PDFs. Two things make it very useful for me. First, it organizes my PDFs and lets me search them, instead of manually searching through directories. Second, it has an OCR plugin, so I can OCR old PDFs and search the text.
- erredois 8mo ago
  Do you pay for their sync or self host? If self host, what do you use?
  - whimsicalism 8mo ago
    uh oh - didn't realize sync was paid (stupidly). apparently i am at 99.6% of the free tier now i'm interested in the answer to your question - i have my own machine running 24/7 that i would love to use. i like the software enough that maybe i'd pay/donate
  - austinjp 8mo ago
    I haven't used Zotero in anger for a few years and can't get to my laptop right now to verify. But I used to rely on automatic exports to a folder that I sync'd elsewhere. Never used a paid Zotero subscription, never "self-hosted" it, and had many gigs of data (including PDF attachments) working fine for years. I used "better bibtex" (?) to ensure files were reliably renamed and moved to an appropriate folder, all automatically. A real set-and-forget setup that ran without hitch for years.
ricksunny 8mo ago
I hope they've fixed the stability issues for Zotero's Google Docs plugin when citation count gets in excess of 100+. It's a special kind of terror when the bibliography breaks and fails tracking with superscripts in the text body. The resulting necessary 'save early, save often' behavior results in accumulating hundreds of manuscript versions till submission.
tony_cannistra 8mo ago
> Zotero is open source and developed by an independent, nonprofit organization that has no financial interest in your private information. With Zotero, you always stay in control of your own data. Refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.
- bayindirh 8mo ago
  Personally I use Zotero with my own WebDAV server for sync. Works as advertised, without a hitch.
  - pseudalopex 8mo ago
    Did you sync all data to multiple computers without a Zotero account? Zotero's documentation said WebDAV could sync attachment files. But everything else required a Zotero account.[1] [1] https://www.zotero.org/support/sync https://www.zotero.org/support/sync
    - jmhammond 8mo ago
      I do both. I have the Zotero account for the library and webdav for the pdf files.
      - pseudalopex 8mo ago
        The question was could all data be synced without a Zotero account.
        jmhammond 8mo ago
        My understanding then is the answer is “probably no.”
    - bayindirh 8mo ago
      No you can't. I have both a Zotero account and a WebDAV server. Since bulk of the load is the attachments, doing it this way doesn't bother me, actually.
trostaft 8mo ago
Love Zotero, have been using it since I started out as a researcher. I've found the PDF view to have noticeably more lag than either preview or skim, but I can live with that for entire package (and can just open the papers in those readers).
Scene_Cast2 8mo ago
I discovered it a few weeks ago. It solved my problem of having a hundred arxiv tabs open. Highly recommended. I'm also looking forward to trying out the new annotations feature.
smuenkel 8mo ago
Honestly the piece of software in my life that I have the least issues with ever. So so good.
ashton314 8mo ago
I have nothing bug praise for Zotero. Zotero is absolutely essential to my workflow as a researcher, second only to Emacs. Without Zotero, I would be spending inordinate amounts of time keeping all my papers + associated citation information organized. Zotero just takes care of it all. I love the iOS app—I read and markup papers on my iPad and everything gets synced smoothly. I've been a paying member for a few years now. Part of it is for the storage (PDF packrat here) but mostly because I want to support development. Please consider supporting them if they help you in your work—they're worth it. https://www.zotero.org/storage https://www.zotero.org/storage
zvr 8mo ago
Another enthusiastic Zotero user here. Current library has 13,775 items and for a low yearly price one can have multi-device sync and support the project. I'm also syncing to a server I own, for complete data ownership (just in case).
- sureglymop 8mo ago
  How do you sync to your own server? Do you mean just "some" data or did you figure out how to self host their open source (but undocumented) backend?
  - austinjp 8mo ago
    My solution: auto-export to a folder then sync using your preferred method. Use the betterbibtex plugin to rename and move all necessary files. Fiddly to set up, but reliable once it's working.
  - specproc 8mo ago
    I think it's just WebDAV, used to be at least.
rossant 8mo ago
Zotero had been “not good enough” for many years. Since version 7, it has become nearly perfect for me. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
catgirlinspace 8mo ago
Coincidentally, I was just looking at using Zotero on Linux this morning after having used it previously on Mac for some classes.
Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo ago
Zotero is fantastic. But I really would love to see organic bibtex support. Betterbibtex works, but it would be better that it were intrinsic feature rather than an add-on.
sureglymop 8mo ago
Is it easily self hostable yet? I'm glad part of their stack is open source but I just wish they made it as easy as a compose file to run this on prem.
BolsunBacset 8mo ago
For those using Zotero for knowledge management or bookmarking, can you give us some examples of how?
ktallett 8mo ago
I'm delighted it's now become available on ARM as I now can have it on my lab computer (Pi) and the Pocket Reform that I use day to day. I still need to come up with an optimal folder system for it though.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
arresin 8mo ago
What a blast from the past (for me at least). When I used this 5 or so years ago (17 years ago) it was extremely effective.
Alifatisk 8mo ago
Doesn't title have space for more context like "tool to collect, organize, annotate, cite research" or something?

245 points by bouchard 8mo ago

dhash 8mo ago

Post Mendeley shutdown, zotero has been an awesome replacement (while not being controlled by Elsevier). Given the amount of PDF's that I see during researchy times in my life, it's been an absolute godsend. Highly reccommend!

angry_octet 8mo ago
Zotero is the best. However, if your brain is highly tuned to use Mendeley Desktop, note that they backed down on killing it, they just won't add new features (where that leaves security updates I'm not sure). https://blog.mendeley.com/2025/07/09/mendeley-is-not-going-anywhere/ https://blog.mendeley.com/2025/07/09/mendeley-is-not-going-a...

Tomte 8mo ago

I‘ve been using it as a general bookmark manager (think Pinboard or Raindrop) for a while now. It‘s a bit quirky, but very powerful with all the management and annotation possibilities. You might say it was just another excuse to curate my thousands of bookmarks and recreate a new tagging structure yet again, but… well, you wouldn‘t be wrong. :-)

dakiol 8mo ago

I've been using Zotero as my "book" organizer. I have all my epubs, pdfs, everything there. Since version 7 I think you can read PDFs within Zotero, and I love it. I keep custom labels so I easily search for stuff. The only feature I don't use is everything about citation (funny enough). Before Zotero I had everything in file system directories, but I wanted the feeling of having one place (one app) where I could see all my books by category, by read/no-read, etc. Having said this, I will probably wait a bit before upgrading to V8 (since I use it everyday, so I wouldn't like to face bugs and the like)

itsrobreally 8mo ago
My experience with Zotero was similar - I tried adding my ebook library to it as an alternative to Calibre because I really want to sort of categorize and easily reference my books and/or get like library call number groupings which is not trivial with Calibre. I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre. Someday I will write an indexer with either a web search tool or an LLM interface to better find info on my books but for now I just spend too much time browsing through the files which makes me sad (but not sad enough yet to overcome the laziness)
- pessimizer 8mo ago
  > I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre. Just find the citation on the web like at Open Library or somewhere, grab it, and add the book as an attachment. I wouldn't drop it because all the stuff may not be done automatically. If you're going to read the books, you should be spending hours with them. I myself only put them into Zotero when I start reading them. I don't need to crowd it with wishful thinking. It's bloated and gets slower the more entries you add.

majkinetor 8mo ago

Zotero is very good nowadays. Its unbearably slow though, and it doesn't seem this will ever get better.

mft_ 8mo ago
Could you share how/when it is slow? We’re considering using this at work and I’d love your feedback.
- austinjp 8mo ago
  Not OP and this is mere anecdata, but on a modest several-years-old ThinkPad, Zotero was slow when my single collection started pushing over 1,000 papers, most of which had PDFs attached. Starting up would take many seconds (half a minute?) and heavy operations such as bulk-renaming would take minutes. But for day-to-day use (adding references to my collection via a browser plugin) it was fine. Personally, I used auto-export for all additional functionality. So, I didn't use any Word (LibreOffice) plugins that hooked into Zotero or whatever. I'd just consume a giant .bib file as and when necessary. On modern hardware Zotero is probably fine. And it's reasonably flexible. A suggestion: export/import a big refs file (plus PDF attachments) and see if it can handle your daily workload. I suspect it will.

kstrauser 8mo ago

My kid was talking about all the papers they had to cite in their college class. I started to suggest that they check out Zotero, but they stopped me to explain that their teachers already had them all using it. Thank you for getting the kids started off on the right foot, professor!

throwaway_24242 8mo ago

[dead]

ifh-hn 8mo ago
Im unaware of another open source tool that provides all zotero does that's lighter weight. I can guarantee it's better than using text files on disk.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- mxuribe 8mo ago
  Hi @ifh-hn , would you mind sharing what features you feel might make zotero better than text files on a disk? I'm genuinely interested to learn. I've heard of zotero maybe a year or so ago, and was curious about it, but never took the plunge. I manage the bulk of my info/knowledge base across mostly locally-saved text files, with a few other tidbits leveraging PDFs and word process files (.odt, .docx)...and really i only use the latter for pasting in screenshots. And, then of course simply synching them across devices using syncthing. While my approach works great for the majority of the time, i can imagine there might be some functions that some other tools might bring me which i might be missing...I suppose one thing that i lack is a graph of linkages for content that might live in different, separate files but might be related, etc. So, would you be willing to share your opinion, experience for what makes zotero better than text files on a disk? :-) Thanks!
  - ifh-hn 8mo ago
    I use it in an academic sense. I use it browser plugin to one click capture a source. Zotero mostly automatically identifies the source type, author, and other metadata. It can retrieve metadata directly from files like pdfs too. Further it has ability to retrieve metadata from ISBN, doi, and other identifiers. It can export these sources to really any citation style and also integrates with other software for this purpose. It has a plugin system for extras too. I have nothing against text files on the disk but zotero is simply much better as a knowledge/source manager.

malshe 8mo ago

If you use Zotero regularly and can afford it, please consider becoming a paying member. https://www.zotero.org/getinvolved https://www.zotero.org/getinvolved

whimsicalism 8mo ago

I highly recommend everyone to use Zotero. Their original marketing as being 'for academics' is entirely wrong and it is a first-in-class bookmark/knowledge manager. There are many software recommendations that seem sort of hype-y: Obsidian, Notion, Keybase, etc. Zotero is not that and is a daily driver for me for years. It has also replaced Calibre for me although YMMV there.

kens 8mo ago
I second the recommendation for Zotero, especially if you find yourself buried under PDFs. Two things make it very useful for me. First, it organizes my PDFs and lets me search them, instead of manually searching through directories. Second, it has an OCR plugin, so I can OCR old PDFs and search the text.
erredois 8mo ago
Do you pay for their sync or self host? If self host, what do you use?
- whimsicalism 8mo ago
  uh oh - didn't realize sync was paid (stupidly). apparently i am at 99.6% of the free tier now i'm interested in the answer to your question - i have my own machine running 24/7 that i would love to use. i like the software enough that maybe i'd pay/donate
- austinjp 8mo ago
  I haven't used Zotero in anger for a few years and can't get to my laptop right now to verify. But I used to rely on automatic exports to a folder that I sync'd elsewhere. Never used a paid Zotero subscription, never "self-hosted" it, and had many gigs of data (including PDF attachments) working fine for years. I used "better bibtex" (?) to ensure files were reliably renamed and moved to an appropriate folder, all automatically. A real set-and-forget setup that ran without hitch for years.

ricksunny 8mo ago

I hope they've fixed the stability issues for Zotero's Google Docs plugin when citation count gets in excess of 100+. It's a special kind of terror when the bibliography breaks and fails tracking with superscripts in the text body. The resulting necessary 'save early, save often' behavior results in accumulating hundreds of manuscript versions till submission.

tony_cannistra 8mo ago

> Zotero is open source and developed by an independent, nonprofit organization that has no financial interest in your private information. With Zotero, you always stay in control of your own data. Refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.

bayindirh 8mo ago
Personally I use Zotero with my own WebDAV server for sync. Works as advertised, without a hitch.
- pseudalopex 8mo ago
  Did you sync all data to multiple computers without a Zotero account? Zotero's documentation said WebDAV could sync attachment files. But everything else required a Zotero account.[1] [1] https://www.zotero.org/support/sync https://www.zotero.org/support/sync
  - jmhammond 8mo ago
    I do both. I have the Zotero account for the library and webdav for the pdf files.
    - pseudalopex 8mo ago
      The question was could all data be synced without a Zotero account.
      - jmhammond 8mo ago
        My understanding then is the answer is “probably no.”
  - bayindirh 8mo ago
    No you can't. I have both a Zotero account and a WebDAV server. Since bulk of the load is the attachments, doing it this way doesn't bother me, actually.

trostaft 8mo ago

Love Zotero, have been using it since I started out as a researcher. I've found the PDF view to have noticeably more lag than either preview or skim, but I can live with that for entire package (and can just open the papers in those readers).

Scene_Cast2 8mo ago

I discovered it a few weeks ago. It solved my problem of having a hundred arxiv tabs open. Highly recommended. I'm also looking forward to trying out the new annotations feature.

smuenkel 8mo ago

Honestly the piece of software in my life that I have the least issues with ever. So so good.

ashton314 8mo ago

I have nothing bug praise for Zotero. Zotero is absolutely essential to my workflow as a researcher, second only to Emacs. Without Zotero, I would be spending inordinate amounts of time keeping all my papers + associated citation information organized. Zotero just takes care of it all. I love the iOS app—I read and markup papers on my iPad and everything gets synced smoothly. I've been a paying member for a few years now. Part of it is for the storage (PDF packrat here) but mostly because I want to support development. Please consider supporting them if they help you in your work—they're worth it. https://www.zotero.org/storage https://www.zotero.org/storage

zvr 8mo ago

Another enthusiastic Zotero user here. Current library has 13,775 items and for a low yearly price one can have multi-device sync and support the project. I'm also syncing to a server I own, for complete data ownership (just in case).

sureglymop 8mo ago
How do you sync to your own server? Do you mean just "some" data or did you figure out how to self host their open source (but undocumented) backend?
- austinjp 8mo ago
  My solution: auto-export to a folder then sync using your preferred method. Use the betterbibtex plugin to rename and move all necessary files. Fiddly to set up, but reliable once it's working.
- specproc 8mo ago
  I think it's just WebDAV, used to be at least.

rossant 8mo ago

Zotero had been “not good enough” for many years. Since version 7, it has become nearly perfect for me. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

catgirlinspace 8mo ago

Coincidentally, I was just looking at using Zotero on Linux this morning after having used it previously on Mac for some classes.

Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo ago

Zotero is fantastic. But I really would love to see organic bibtex support. Betterbibtex works, but it would be better that it were intrinsic feature rather than an add-on.

sureglymop 8mo ago

Is it easily self hostable yet? I'm glad part of their stack is open source but I just wish they made it as easy as a compose file to run this on prem.

BolsunBacset 8mo ago

For those using Zotero for knowledge management or bookmarking, can you give us some examples of how?

ktallett 8mo ago

I'm delighted it's now become available on ARM as I now can have it on my lab computer (Pi) and the Pocket Reform that I use day to day. I still need to come up with an optimal folder system for it though.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

arresin 8mo ago

What a blast from the past (for me at least). When I used this 5 or so years ago (17 years ago) it was extremely effective.

Alifatisk 8mo ago

Doesn't title have space for more context like "tool to collect, organize, annotate, cite research" or something?