Is there anything that Endnote can do but Zotero can't do?

isonomia

Hi folks,

I was thinking about uninstalling Endnote from my disk.
I hear there a feature of journal statistics in Endnote, but I never tired it.
Is there any good reason to leave it on my computer?

Thanks a lot!

ajlyon

It is sometimes useful for importing data from certain formats that Zotero does not support.

adamsmith

It depends. There are a number of features in Endnote that Zotero doesn't have.
Among the most important:
- Endnotes allows you to batch-edit items, e.g. change or add the author for multiple items at once (it might even have search&replace)
- Endnote works better with super-large libraries. Zotero isn't much joy with libraries above 20,000 - Endnote has no limit.
- Endnote allows for multiple, sorted bibliographies, e.g. one for primary sources and one for secondary sources as is common in history
- Endnote can use lists of journal abbreviations to replace journal names in citations
- Endnote has some import options (e.g. from Excel I believe) that Zotero doesn't have.

There are probably a couple more. If you're happy with Zotero you're probably never miss them, but since you asked...
Generally I'd err on the side of keeping software around - you might want to collaborate with someone who refuses to use anything but Endnote, for example.

unhammer

"you might want to collaborate with someone who refuses to use anything but Endnote, for example." precisely for this reason I tend to delete software like Endnote, so that I can say "oh, sorry, I don't have that and I don't really want to spend a bunch of money on it right now, but Zotero is free..." but I understand that not everyone is willing to do that ;)

bdarcus

And in Endnote you can create or edit styles.

Not at all endorsing using it, though ;-)

few

FWIW, you *can* create or edit styles in Zotero... though it does take a bit of work...

I look forward to batch edits and/or journal abbreviation list support.

pet1202

adamsmith wrote:
- Endnote works better with super-large libraries. Zotero isn't much joy with libraries above 20,000 - Endnote has no limit.

Is 20000 an "official" number? Is it likely to increase in the future? What is the reason for this limitation?

Thanks,
paul

PS: I love Zotero.

adamsmith

no it's not official.
The two limitations are syncing and speed.
syncing very large libraries isn't currently possible but, if I understand correctly, that is about to be solved.

Speed is a matter of taste as well as the actual speed of the computer. With full-text indexing off, I don't think it's a problem even with large databases at the moment. Speed issues are continuously being addressed. I believe there is the hope that FF 4.0 will allow for a significant bump in performance.

bdarcus

FWIW, you *can* create or edit styles in Zotero... though it does take a bit of work...

For most users though, changing styles is not practical. So yes, you can edit styles; but not from within the Zotero GUI.

ftr

I still have Endnote on my pc because years ago I was obliged to buy it : at that time it was just the standard in my discipline. If you want to do collaborative research, write multi-author articles you had to have it because all the other colleagues already used it. Today, it may have changed but I just keep it.

But Zotero and EndNote do not have the capacities of finding and sorting text like AskSam has (search in context, for instance). It is really a pity that Zotero does not allow this. This functionality just helps to work with large text data bases. For instance, when you search two strings you don't get aa result a document that has the first term in the first para and the second 15 pages later, but only those that have both terms in the same sentence.

But I guess Zotero will never in this class, it's a very easy-to-use biblio data base. That's already ok.

ajlyon

But note that since Zotero is open source and open to innovative user contributions, it would be possible to build a plug-in for Zotero that did search in context. That would be nearly impossible for Endnote, and their past behavior might make you worry that they'd sue you for trying.

noksagt

In fact, Zotero plans to use SQLite's full text search in the future. Once this happens, adding the ability to do NEAR queries should be relatively straight-forward.