Best practice for Collaborating with research assistants and syncing over dropbox

Msimky

I'm a new Zotero user. I'm trying to use Zotero, plus research assistant labor, to reorganize my PDFs and build a good Zotero library. I was hoping for some advice on best practices.

I like to keep PDFs of the articles, reports, and books I'm citing inside a folder in Dropbox for each of my research projects, along with data and drafts for that project. Ideally, the PDFs would be searchable, they would be the final published version of the source material (as originally formatted), and they would be saved with a file name that is the bluebook (law review) citation of the article. I'm not 100 percent of the way there--some PDFs need to be OCRed, some draft versions of sources needed to be replaced with the final published version, some PDFs need to be renamed, etc.

So I'm having a research assistant work on cleaning up the citations, OCR PDFs, and move things into my Zotero library. I share my Dropbox folders with them, and I've been sharing my Zotero account password so they can make changes to the library remotely from their own computer.

At the end of a research project--when an article has been accepted by a journal--I often share the drop box folder with the journal that is publishing the paper to help them track down the source material and more quickly edit my manuscript for publication.

I like Zotero's ability to extract metadata from PDFs and then quickly generate the proper blue book cite. I've been dragging and dropping PDFs into Zotero and then right clicking to extract the meta data. But I've realized this creates a copy of the PDF in the Zotero storage folder, and this copy is different from the copy in the Dropbox folder for the project. So if I want to annotate or rename, it gets tricky, and spotlight will have more duplicate hits.

I have a very big PDF library, and this duplication is also starting to take-up a lot of hard drive space and Dropbox space. I'm tempted to switch to using linked files instead of stored files. But will the links sync across computers when I sync my library? Is there any downside to using linked files instead of stored files?

I've seen several threads warning against moving the Zotero data directory to Dropbox because of possible corruption of the sqlite database file.

I moved the directory to DropBox before I saw the thread, and so far, I haven't had any problems--just DropBox creating conflicted copies.

Have I just been lucky? Should I move the Zotero directory out of dropbox and just create a symbolic link to a storage subdirectory in dropbox? Can I get by with symbolic links, relative paths, and sharing dropbox folders with my RAs so the relative paths match?

Please advise.

Thanks.

dstillman

There's a lot in here, and some of it will be addressed by your other threads, so I'll just address this at the moment:

I moved the directory to DropBox before I saw the thread, and so far, I haven't had any problems--just DropBox creating conflicted copies.

This is in fact a critical problem — this is precisely how you corrupt your database. You absolutely should move your data directory out of Dropbox, and in fact we can't help you with any problems until you have and have checked your database integrity in the Advanced -> Files and Folders pane of the preferences.

fbennett

Seconding what Dan says: getting your database out of Dropbox should be your first priority.