Upgrade Storagesearch context ; more info for browser grab
I've spent the last few days playing with both Zotero and Mendeley trying to figure out what I like better. There are some really nice features of Zotero that make me want to keep using it -- the automated pdf finding, the (mildly) nicer word processor integration, some others. Plus I'd already used it a few years ago (before I stopped because I stopped using firefox).
That said, there are a couple of features I would love to see.
1) This was my favorite feature in Mendeley -- when doing a full text search, the results show a little blurb -- a sentence or so worth of context around the search term. Very often I don't remember papers by their titles, and this is usually a very fast way of identifying the paper I was looking for. Also if a search brings up an unexpected result, it can be a way to quickly see if the appearance of the search term is interesting at all without having to open the pdf.
2) When I am looking at an abstract in my browser and I click the import button (on the toolbar through chrome connector) sometimes zotero manages to find the full text pdf and sometimes it doesn't. I understand this depends on what site I'm using and how the translator works (though I am not so interested in the details). However, presumably the software knows whether it's going to be able to find it before I do the import. It would be nice if the icon was different in the two cases -- if I know that Zotero won't be able to get the pdf, then I will go and get it manually, and it'll save me the step of looking back in the Zotero window to see if it got it.
3) I saw this suggested in another forum post, but a quick "get pdf" feature (say in the right-click menu) would be fantastic. For some of my old references where I don't have the full text, I've been going through and downloading it. My process is basically to open the old entry (through the URL or DOI), immediately save the resulting page to zotero (this typically gets the full text) and then delete the old entry. Surely this is an automatable process that can then be run once for a number of entries.
4) This is mostly a personal preference, but I find the "snapshot" attachments completely useless (at least for journal articles, which are 99% of my entries). I've figured out now to disable the automatic downloading of them, but just take this as a datapoint in case you reconsider the default behavior. There really isn't much more information there than in the metadata already stored with the article -- if I want anything else, I'm going to need the full text anyway.
That said, there are a couple of features I would love to see.
1) This was my favorite feature in Mendeley -- when doing a full text search, the results show a little blurb -- a sentence or so worth of context around the search term. Very often I don't remember papers by their titles, and this is usually a very fast way of identifying the paper I was looking for. Also if a search brings up an unexpected result, it can be a way to quickly see if the appearance of the search term is interesting at all without having to open the pdf.
2) When I am looking at an abstract in my browser and I click the import button (on the toolbar through chrome connector) sometimes zotero manages to find the full text pdf and sometimes it doesn't. I understand this depends on what site I'm using and how the translator works (though I am not so interested in the details). However, presumably the software knows whether it's going to be able to find it before I do the import. It would be nice if the icon was different in the two cases -- if I know that Zotero won't be able to get the pdf, then I will go and get it manually, and it'll save me the step of looking back in the Zotero window to see if it got it.
3) I saw this suggested in another forum post, but a quick "get pdf" feature (say in the right-click menu) would be fantastic. For some of my old references where I don't have the full text, I've been going through and downloading it. My process is basically to open the old entry (through the URL or DOI), immediately save the resulting page to zotero (this typically gets the full text) and then delete the old entry. Surely this is an automatable process that can then be run once for a number of entries.
4) This is mostly a personal preference, but I find the "snapshot" attachments completely useless (at least for journal articles, which are 99% of my entries). I've figured out now to disable the automatic downloading of them, but just take this as a datapoint in case you reconsider the default behavior. There really isn't much more information there than in the metadata already stored with the article -- if I want anything else, I'm going to need the full text anyway.
actually no, in many cases it doesn't (with most translators, if there is a pdf attached, Zotero at least tries to get to it, which is all it knows at this point). I do think (and we've brought this up before) that the message that tells you an item has been saved should include the attachments it saves.
As far as I know 1) is not going to be possible currently because of the way the full text search feature works (Mendeley licensed a proprietary pdf library for this and some of their other pdf features).
3) would be nice, but is not as trivial as it sounds and may also run afoul of usage conditions for commercial databases (not saying it does - just that I wouldn't be surprised if it did).
edit: @2 - but if you have a site where there is a PDF and it's not attached, do let us know - it's possible the translator isn't working correctly or hasn't been set-up to do that. Generally, though, PDF attachments are less reliable in Standalone than in FF still. (E.g. you'll never get PDF attachments for EBSCO in standalone, but you will in FF).
Regarding (2), yes, showing what attachments were saved would basically be sufficient also.
And regarding (1) that's unfortunate -- I'm just going to mention again how nice it would be though :)