Zotero is one of those pieces of open source software that has really improved my life. I first discovered it as a teenager and it revolutionised writing papers and managing sources. Sadly I don’t find myself using it that much in my job.
I always got a kick out of introducing it to my friends in the humanities and blowing their minds. I have no idea how anyone writes papers without zotero or another similar tool.
Keep up the good work.
What really blows my mind is how many of my academically inclined friends manage (and cloud sync) a big library of pirated papers using a rival piece of software owned by a major rights holder of said pirated papers. I mean... there's a good chance nothing will come of it, but it just seems like tempting fate. Zotero isn't just good enough, it's so good that the choice is completely trivial IMO!
I've converted all my colleagues to Zotero, even though the University has contracted subscriptions to EndNote et al. Zotero is just better. I wish that the UC System would contract with Zotero for their mutual benefit.
It really is the superior product/project. I switched to Zotero from Mendeley this year. The thing that was keeping me back before was the lack of internal PDF reader and annotator. I'm not sure when that came into Zotero, but now it is... /chefkiss
I had to use a trial version of Endnote 9 because a collaborator was using it. It was slow. Adding paper by DOI would freeze the interface for ten or more seconds on a database of less than 100 papers. Meanwhile adding a paper by DOI to my Zotero DB (curently 2000+ papers) is a snap.
I assume you're talking about Papers? The main feature is that there's an iPad/Android app that syncs really cleanly.
With Zotero, syncing reliably across multiple devices was always hit or miss for me. Saving a few papers throughout my day, going home and reading/annotating them on my iPad, and then going back to work and pulling up a paper from the previous day with its annotations intact is the dream workflow for consuming academic lit that has always just worked with Papers but always required a lot of effort with Zotero. Maybe this is more of a "me" problem than a Zotero problem, but if I can't configure Zotero to sync reliably then many academics won't be able to.
There are some other neat features too. The built-in reader is good enough to not bother going with a third party. The handling of in-text references is better than any alternative (the actual reference is listed when hovering or clicking the reference number in text–a seemingly basic feature that lots of citation managers and PDF readers don't have that is essential for maintaining concentration). The handling of figures, metrics, and smart suggestion of related articles is also top-notch. I was sad to make the conversion from FOSS but haven't looked back yet. Hopefully this new Zotero release will make it possible to transition back–it looks like lots of killer features in Papers are offered by Zotero 6, which is great to see.
As for the rights-holding thing, most journals give their authors the right to distribute their work for free upon request, and there are some other loopholes for getting papers afaik, so I don't think it would be worth the time or effort to go after people with a few sci-hubbed papers in their Papers account. I am afraid that DRM will make this much harder though, especially for papers that have been downloaded on a university network for later offline reading.
Does Elsevier really own Papers, Endnode, and Mendeley?
EDIT: no, it looks like Elsevier just owns Mendeley, which is what I was getting at. Uploading a bunch of papers to a company that's in a position to turn around and say "Those are some nice papers you uploaded to our servers, unfortunately they are evidence that you have fallen victim to piracy, now fork over $15k or we will be forced to proceed with a $15M lawsuit" just seems a bit reckless. Shrug.
I prefer Zotero, even though I would never even think of pirating a paper. Perish the thought!
To be fair Endnote license was given out for free and we didn't have to pirate articles as the university paid for all of these academic journal subscriptions.
That is exactly how I use it and it works great for that.
Among other things, I love that I can subscribe to RSS feeds and then save individual items I want to be able to reference later on.
Before that I tried several things, local bookmarks, bookmark services (actually just delicious), and an org file for references, but Zotero is the most seamless system for knowledge repository for my use case.
The web plugin actually falls back to 'web page with snapshot' if it can't detect a journal paper, which in many ways is better than trying to drag around big PDF binaries.
Thanks! I've used zotero only minimally, mostly to support users of my software who use zotero, rather than using it myself for my own purposes.
Is the "web plugin" something built into zotero, or an extra plugin to install? Calling it "plugin" makes it sound like something extra to install, but not finding it easily googling. Help me out?
I think OP talks about the Zotero Connector Browser Plugin. So its not a plugin for zotero but your browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Edge are supported)
The plugin ads a button to the Browser where you can add the currently viewed page to your database.
It even tries to detect references to papers or other content and choose the matching entry type. Eg on Google Scholar you can choose which search result you want to add. It its a PDF the file gets saved to your zotero database.
I always got a kick out of introducing it to my friends in the humanities and blowing their minds. I have no idea how anyone writes papers without zotero or another similar tool. Keep up the good work.