Upgrade StoragePoor first impression of Zotero
I'm preparing references for the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The citation style is (Last name year). Zotero can't handle something as basic as this. Instead it gives (Last name, first name year). It forces you to edit to change this, and then gives you an alarming message "Warning: If you edit a citation in the editor it will not longer...." Huh??_*)(&!!!! I have no idea what this means.
There is no way to find out what citation style a style in the list of citation styles will yield. Instead, one has to pick one, close the dialog, insert a citation, discover how it looks, cancel, reopen Document Preferences, pick another style, say OK, and then repeat. This is NUTS!!!!!!!!!!
My first reference should be of this format: Arrow, Kenneth. “Toward a Theory of Price Adjustment” in The Allocation of Economic Resources, Moses Abramovitz et al., eds. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1959).
Zotero can't handle this. This tool is a complete waste of my time. I would recommend that you radically improve your documentation and try to support real world use and do some genuine usability testing.
There is no way to find out what citation style a style in the list of citation styles will yield. Instead, one has to pick one, close the dialog, insert a citation, discover how it looks, cancel, reopen Document Preferences, pick another style, say OK, and then repeat. This is NUTS!!!!!!!!!!
My first reference should be of this format: Arrow, Kenneth. “Toward a Theory of Price Adjustment” in The Allocation of Economic Resources, Moses Abramovitz et al., eds. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1959).
Zotero can't handle this. This tool is a complete waste of my time. I would recommend that you radically improve your documentation and try to support real world use and do some genuine usability testing.
There is no QJE style because no one has ever written or requested one - I'd imagine 99% of QJE manuscripts are submitted as LaTeX.
(If your intention was not to entertain, please forgive. In that case, I would recommend that the next time you attempt to use a piece of software, you request help before working yourself into a purple froth.)
Thanks for the reply. Apologies about my tone. They were due to two hours of frustration using Zotero. I have ten years software dev experience, so I can spot software problems that are real problems as opposed to imagined ones.
My impressions are that eventually Zotero will be THE standard for ref mgt. The overall design is excellent. Congrats!
But what I've found is doc quality and usability currently don't meet my needs. The alternative is talking to you to figure out how to use the tool to accomplish my task. I expect Zotero and you can do that. My gripe is Zotero alone cannot. I have no idea how many hours it will take to talk to you to figure out how to complete my task, or if it can actually be done in a manner that's more efficient than doing it manually.
Could you refer me to the doc that can describe how to accomplish my task?
The reason I ask is the "Word Processor Plugin Usage" doc is scant. See http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage. This covers almost nothing. This is "rough out" doc. It's someone's first pass. It needs to be expanded by a factor of ten or more, based on usability testing. But again, it's great to see the project get this far.
Plus if I understand the situation correctly the doc is wrong. When I follow the procedure, choose American Psychological Association, select my one test title, I get "(Arrow, Kenneth, 1959)" and not the full reference shown in the doc. I don't get that until I insert a bib. What does the Page drop down do? The doc doesn't say. What does the cryptic warning message mean? The doc doesn't say.
Finally, after inserting a wrong citation Word's undo doesn't work correctly. The undo says "Undo VBA-Font.Size" which is not true. It should say "Undo Insert Citation." At this point control Z does nothing. It's a bug. One has to manually delete the citation and try again. All this made what could have been a pleasurable experience just the opposite.
But don't worry. I tested an EndNote X5 trial. It's much worse. Unusable, even with a style for QJE.
Thanks,
Jack
Hmm, this didn't post the first time. "Some problems were encountered." Will try again.
http://citationstyles.org/downloads/primer.html
http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html
If you get
(Arrow, Kenneth, 1959)
in APA style, something is wrong in your data in Zotero. APA will never display the full first name in a citation. What likely happened is that you have
Arrow, Kenneth in a single author field, rather than in separate fields. If you manually input the data you just did this wrong - using the comma instead of tab between last and first name. If you imported the data automatically let us know where from and we'll try to fix it.
The documentation is not wrong - it tells you how to insert a citation and then later that
"To generate a bibliography from all the items you have referenced, click the “Zotero Insert Bibliography” - that's exactly right. I also disagree that it should be longer - a) I'm still not sure what it doesn't cover and b) no one wants to read 10 pages of documentation.
The page dropdown menu isn't explained, true - it's used very rarely for most people, you can use it for locators other than pages (chapters, paragraphs etc.) - if you click on it that's pretty self explantory.
I don't know how to better explain what you call the "cryptic warning" - once you've edited a citation in a document it won't update anymore - not if you change the data in Zotero, nor if you change the style. If you have suggestions for better language we can think about that though.
More tomorrow.
chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul
and
chrome://zotero/content/tools/cslpreview.xul
Frank has linked to the documents on editing styles, which you'll need to fix a style to fit with QJE guidelines.
As for usability - I think what you see as an advantage - 10 years of dev work - is likely a disadvantage. People with that degree of experience are often very set in the way they want things to be/work and actually not great in adapting to anything new (I, for example, look like I've never seen a computer before when I have to use a stupid Mac). We know from user workshops and testimony that most new users find Zotero intuitive and easy to use.
OK - as far as I can see this should cover everything you asked - let us know if there are more specific questions.