Mendeley's 'file organizer' function in Zotero?

paulstange

Hello,

I'm thinking about switching to Zotero, mainly due to the ability of easily creating your own citationstyle, which seems to be difficult with mendeley.

However, one thing that keeps me from switching is the fact that I cant seem to find a function in Zotero, that automatically organizes my pdfs added to Zotero in a local folder on my mac.

With mendeley I just enter a directory in the preferences, and it sorts all my files (subfolders for each year).
Does Zotero offer this function as well?

damnation

Mendeley uses the same system (Citation Style Language) and database of citation styles. You can just make a style and use the .csl file in Mendeley. ;)
http://editor.citationstyles.org/visualEditor/
(The CSL database feeds into some 30+ softwares: https://citationstyles.org/)

Re the other things, I´ll let the others answer.
Generally though, and I used to be a Mendeley user, Zotero is a lot better, with way better support and many more things up it's sleeve.

dstillman

@paulstrange: By default, Zotero stores files within its own data directory. If you really want to keep files in your own external directory, you can use linked files, and the ZotFile plugin makes that easy. Lots of people do that, but note that linked files won't be synced by Zotero and won't be deleted when you delete them from Zotero, so you'd want to make sure you had a good reason before going that route.

With stored files, you just let Zotero manage them and access the files through Zotero, which offers more ways to search/organize/tag them than you get through the filesystem. You can still search for them via Spotlight if you want to.

adamsmith

You can use http://zotfile.com for pretty much the same effect in Zotero, yes. (Though note that Zotero and Mendeley use the same citation styles, so there's no difference in editing them between the two)

paulstange

First of, I'm impressed by the speed of support in this forum. Thanks for all the quick replies!

@damnation Thanks for the link. Very helpful! I will for sure give it a try. I'm still leaning towards the switch, but could you elaborate on the things that Zotero offers in comparison to mendeley?

@dstillman I see. I've read about ZotFile, but your arguments are solid. I might just leave it be for now and let Zotero organize it the way it does. I was confused for a while, cause when I manually added an entry to my library in Zotero and then attached a link to a pdf, Zotero didnt take the information (author, year, etc.) from the file. You have to click 'store copy of file' if im not mistaken, right?

@adamsmith Thanks, see my answer to dstillman!

bwiernik

Zotero has better group sharing, higher quality web import from more websites, a faster and more stable Word/LibreOffice plugin, a Google Docs plugin, and for more obscure item types, better support for citation styles (Mendeley maps some item types and fields to weird CSL variables). Beyond that, Zotero development is in general faster and more responsive (e.g., I believe that Mendeley still can’t run on the most recent MacOS version [or it took them very long to add it]; at one point, Mendeley randomly started to delete saved PDF files for many users and it took months to fix it).

If you want to switch, see here for the best method: https://zotero.org/support/kb/mendeley_import

dstillman

I was confused for a while, cause when I manually added an entry to my library in Zotero and then attached a link to a pdf, Zotero didnt take the information (author, year, etc.) from the file.

If there's already a parent item, adding a PDF to it doesn't change anything. If you want Zotero to try to retrieve metadata for a PDF, you need to add the PDF as a standalone item.

There are lots of different ways to add things, so see Adding Items to Zotero for more details. But generally you just save via an article page on the web, and Zotero will attach the PDF automatically as long as you have access to it. You can add PDFs directly and let it try to recognize metadata, but that's not generally the best approach.

emilianoeheyns

In addition to everything @bwiernik mentioned, Zotero has a plugin system so that if (most) anything doesn't work according to how you want it, that's (usually) fixable with a plugin; case in point: ZotFile.

Then there's also the matter that Mendeley seems intent on keeping your research data hostage to their system.