Upgrade StorageThinking about switching from Endnotes to Zotero... Your experiences!
Hi,
Zotero looks very interesting. I'm trying to get a sense of whether I should try to make the switch from Endnote x1. I'd be curious to hear your experiences, especially if they're comparative. I'm using the legendary word processor Textmaker! So, I won't need any of the plugin support for Word or OO. What I'll mostly be doing is importing my 2000 items from EN. What I'm concerned about is: 1) whether I can import straight from Google Scholar, 2) whether I can import from my library catalogue or Library of Congress catalogue, 3) whether I can import from Philosopher's Index. Also, I'm a bit concerned about speed. I'm using FF3. Is Zotero going to grind my browser to a crawl? Anyhow, this looks like a fantastic little product. Very exciting. Help me decide.
Zotero looks very interesting. I'm trying to get a sense of whether I should try to make the switch from Endnote x1. I'd be curious to hear your experiences, especially if they're comparative. I'm using the legendary word processor Textmaker! So, I won't need any of the plugin support for Word or OO. What I'll mostly be doing is importing my 2000 items from EN. What I'm concerned about is: 1) whether I can import straight from Google Scholar, 2) whether I can import from my library catalogue or Library of Congress catalogue, 3) whether I can import from Philosopher's Index. Also, I'm a bit concerned about speed. I'm using FF3. Is Zotero going to grind my browser to a crawl? Anyhow, this looks like a fantastic little product. Very exciting. Help me decide.
Thanx so much for the reply. Zotero does look amazing. Are folks using it to replace Endnotes or are most using it just to collect from especially electronic sources and web clipping? I realize you can't exactly customize styles as you can in Endnote, at least not easily from what I've been reading. But personally I've moved away from MS products, including Word and love the idea of moving to open source bibliographic software. I've been using EN since v4 and have never been enamoured, and the cost is simply prohibitive for many low paid academic types.
OTOH, to do so ATM, you need some skills in XML. So, for example, if you have some comfort with hand-editing HTML, you'd probably be able to figure out how to edit a style.
But ... most people don't have this skill, so the consequence is that from those users' perspective, you . But this is a problem that will get solved.
When exactly will personalizing styles be implemented? And if it is not implemented: Is there a how-to or some other kind of help to learn how to do it? Where would the files be that I have to change?
My general experience is that Zotero wins out on most accounts (we actually did a "competition" at our University library which we won with Zotero http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2340/help-zotero-win-citefest-competition/).
Converting old citations (actually using endnote export from biblioscape) worked like a charm.
I'd say the biggest issue currently is the style generator. There's also the occasional imprecision in one of the citation styles.
Since I already have EndNote, and since most of the people I work with use EndNote, I still use EndNote styles for writing papers. Zotero doesn't have as many packaged styles, and creating new styles isn't worth it to the people on my project at this point.
However, if you aren't constantly formatting and re-formatting papers for different journals, but just need a basic array of popular academic citation styles, Zotero is perfect. Compared to EndNote, Zotero's paper writing interface is more adaptable to different word processing environments, and the interface with Word, in particular, is simpler.
I think it would make sense to buy EndNote if you already knew that you were comfortable with EndNote's output styles, felt the need for a vast style library at your fingertips, and didn't have the time or mindset to delve into Zotero's style creation capabilities. Even then I would suggest using Zotero for creating libraries, and using EndNote as a secondary citation tool.
Not sure what you mean by Z not supporting italics? Do you mean you can't input italics? Or you can't output italics? You don't need to be able to input italics for obvious reasons. But Z outputs italics according to the style you choose; if it didn't that would surely be a problem that would render the program nearly useless. So, if you pick Chicago Author-Date as your output style, for instance, that will italicize book titles, but not journal articles, since that's the rule in Chicago. Anyhow, so unless I have misunderstood you, I think you'll find that Z does support italics. :)
s/he means italics _within_ fields -- as in
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/667/
one of the tickets in the bugs data base says:
Starting with Revision 1456 of core.vb (1454 of Zotero.dot), text surrounded by underscores will be italicized in citations and bibliographies inserted with the Word plugin
I haven't tested it (don't use the Word plugin), but maybe that is
a sufficient workaround for philosopherdog for now?
Ben
On the positive side of things, however, this has a ticket assigned
https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/439
and has just been upgraded to major priority. Landmark is version 1.5 so lets hope for the best
It would be good, BTW, if Zotero's style preview on the repository included multiple citations.
I really love zotero for its simplicity, but it is a fatal flaw, that you can't group the notes you take into collections and generate reports on them. zotero would be cool, cool, cool if it had that functionality !!!!
(Especially on MacOSX, where we are used to itunes-type of gui, but have no publications/excerpts management software which is that simple to use. zotero looks like a great start, but it's its missing that simple important feature. Why? For what zotero does up to now, you can almost always use BibDesk on Mac which is also free and more mature.)
BibDesk is great & some of my colleagues use it as their primary BibTeX tool. However, it can't do nearly everything that Zotero can (though it can do a few things that Zotero can't). Off the top of my head, BibDesk lacks word processor integration, supports info retrieval from fewer databases, and the annotation/note taking aspects (which you want to see improved in Zotero) are almost non-existent.
EDIT: beaten to the punch by Bruce. Preserving the post for the BibDesk comparison, though.
There exists software that can do excerpt management and thus meets the needs of academic writing processes - I did an extensive internet research on that: Scribe3 for example does it, but it' s not as simple to use as zotero and thus blocks your creativity. Also, it is not developped any more. Another very, very good software - which is being used throughout all my faculty - is the swiss made citavi. It is much, much, much more powerful and state of the art than Endnote. It has citations, exerpts and notetaking management and many other features Endnote doesn't. But it's commercial and it only runs on Windows machines. zotero could even score against citavi, because it has portability which is becoming increasingly important.
EDIT: After two days of struggling, I now found a way to run citavi in MacOSX (citavi in Windows in a window ...) - being happy. Will look back to zotero from time to time, cause it's free. Maybe some day I can use it for my purposes.