EndNote Citation Compatiblity

mpickard

Hi -

I love Zotero, but the fact of life is that EndNote is used by the vast majority of my colleagues at the university I'm attending. Therefore, if I create a paper with Zotero citations and hand it off to a colleague, he/she can't use the Zotero citations; and vice versa. So, the biggest obstacle to me using zotero is not having "citation compatibility". Much like Open Office can open and edit Word documents, Zotero would be greatly benefited by being able to edit EndNote citations and produce EndNote compatible citations.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks,

Matt

adamsmith

that's not going to happen. Most likely never.
For a start, Endnote isn't just proprietary and closed, its maker also has the nasty habit of suing people (including Zotero...) even when they're not doing anything illegal.
But even if using Zotero, two people can use the same document only if they use the citation from the same library (or group) - i.e. after synchronizing. I think the chance that Zotero and Endnote will ever synchronize to a sufficient degree to achieve that is zilch.

Btw. my understanding is this wouldn't work with two Endnote users either, or am I wrong?

mpickard

hi adam -
in Endnote, a "traveling library" accompanies the Word doc. so, user 1 can send user 2 a doc and user 2 can see and edit all the citations user 1 inserted. how is doc sharing done with other cit. mng. tools?
matt

fbennett

As I understand it, the Zotero developers are working toward embedding citation data in the document itself, which should permit document sharing between users of Zotero, and of any other reference manager (Mendeley?) that uses the same data model and extraction methods.

Once that facility is implemented on the Zotero side, I guess that, as you say, you'd have a situation similar to Word vs OO, in which the main barrier to interworking is differences in the storage format. Hard to say what happens from there, but as adamsmith says, the friendly folks at EndNote are unlikely to figure prominently in the effort to find a solution.

mpickard

Those darn Endnote folks!

Just a thought. I was noticing that there is a Word 2007 Citation format. Endnote has an option to "Convert Word 2007 Citations to Endnote". Is it possible to put a "Convert Zotero Citations to Word 2007" option in Zotero? Then at least a Zotero user could convert the citations into a format which (theoretically) could be used by an Endnote user.