Thesis writing: tips, tricks, troubles or testimonies for doing it with Zotero

lizardofox
I'm very excited about Zotero and it’s possibilities, but I have also run across some comments here suggesting people have had problems with such large MIcrosoft Word documents and Zotero. So I'm generally wondering if anyone who has completed such a project using the current version of Zotero has any tips, tricks, shortcuts, (what to do or not to do etc.) or testimonials to share about doing it that way.

A thread on that general topic might be very helpful to a number of us, but I also have two more specific questions:

1) How well does Zotero handle putting together a list of works cited for a whole thesis at the very end when (I think) I will also be cutting and pasting all the separate chapters into a single huge Microsoft Word 2003 document in order to produce a table of contents and make cross-references between tables and graphs in chapters, etc.? (Been told not it’s not wise/stable to use master documents.) Any tips or trouble here?

2)I would also like to start moving all my bibliographic database information over to Zotero from Endnote, as well as using Zotero for my more general research gathering, notetaking and idea networking, but having already written on substantial portion of my thesis, I'm wondering if it's worthwhile, or may even be problematic in some ways I cannot foresee, for me to switch over to Zotero now. (If I don’t switch over now, I will have to structure a more awkward network between articles, notes, and citations concerning my thesis subject within Zotero at a later date.)

Any perspectives on any these points would be greatly appreciated!
  • bdarcus
    edited August 7, 2008
    Part of what you need is general tips on using Word for theses and other "long documents". I recall looking for just that when I did my a decade ago, and that John McGhie had some great suggestions. See google.

    So, right, don't use master documents, and do you styles religiously. And have a backup strategy.

    WRT to Zotero, it seems wise to avoid inserting the bibliography until the very end.
    I'm wondering if it's worthwhile, or may even be problematic in some ways I cannot foresee, for me to switch over to Zotero now.
    I'd say the sooner the better.
  • qquidd
    I agree with the "styles" part above but not the "master documents" part. 'Master Documents' may be a little tricky to manage sometimes but for me was extremely helpful. I have used the 'master documents' feature for all my three engineering theses, and currently use it for all my technical papers etc. The important thing is you learn the tool properly; as the saying goes, 'a fool with a tool is still a fool'.

    And backup, backup, backup.
  • bdarcus
    edited August 7, 2008
    The issue with master documents in Word isn't the concept, or the user experience; it's that they are known to be really buggy. See, for example, this from McGhie. His conclusion:
    A master document has only two possible states: Corrupt, or just about to be corrupt. And that is why we say that the only possible fix to a master document is “don't use it!”
    So unless you have documented evidence that this feature has been fixed in more recent version of Word (certainly possible*, but doubtful), it seems prudent to avoid using it.

    * there's a link on that article to another that claims to describe how to use the feature safely, but I'm still skeptical, b.c it seems to me the problem has to do with low-level design.
  • sean
    Great quote.
  • jardiel
    I am currently using Zotero and Master documents to write my thesis. So far (fingers crossed - and many back ups) using master documents has been fine.

    I am however more than a bit frustrated with Zotero. I can not get it to format the references for government publications properly. I am using Chicago style and none of the options for items (books, journals etc.) format the references correctly. Using Endnote I would easily be able to configure this however I needed.

    I haven't been able to find any advice on how to do this for Zotero - so I for one wish I still had Endnote as an option.
  • erazlogo
    I am using Chicago style and none of the options for items (books, journals etc.) format the references correctly.
    Please let us know where books and journals are formatted incorrectly in Chicago and we'll see what we can do.
  • jardiel
    Thanks erazlogo

    I think what I need is an author field for "issuing Body" and a then another one for "personal or company author". YOu will note that these are not displayed the same way that additional authors for a book or journal article would be.

    Here is what I am trying (but can't) seem to do:

    General Format taken from How to Cite Government of Canada Documents:

    Issuing body. Title, Personal Author. (Report number; medium). Edition. Place of
    publication: Publisher, Date. (Series title, number). (Notes).

    Example:
    Canada. Environment Canada. Canadian Wildlife Service. The Ecology, Status and Conservation of Marine and Shoreline Birds of the Queen Charlotte Islands, Kees Vermeer and Ken H. Morgan. Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 1997. (Occasional Paper No. 93).
  • lizardofox
    Thanks for your feedback!
    Based on it I'm still not sure if I should, at this point, switch over to Zotero from Endnote for bibliographic purposes (As I noted elsewhere, I have trouble getting into the main database I need to use, psychinfo on OvidSP--no one responded to this request for info/help in a few weeks--and Endnote goes in directly without having to go through lots of screens every time the connection times out).

    As for everything else research-related, I only wish I had discovered Zotero earlier, or that there was some efficient method for transferring my sprawling self-structured files.

    If anyone has any other "writing-thesis-with-Zotero" tips, tricks, insights, shortcuts, pitfalls, or double forehead slaps to share, I hope they'll chime in and helf make this thread useful to others.

    I'll come back to this as I/after I bungle my way through!
  • JonEP
    I wanted to revive this thread and ask if anyone has any advice on using Zotero with large, multi-chapter documents (ie., dissertations and books). I've also seen some negative discussion of Master Documents in Word, and think I will avoid that route. So, this means writing the chapters as individual documents and then combining them for the diss. Does zotero do well with this? Any insights from current or recent thesis - writers out there?

    Thanks,
    J
  • alandsloane
    My plan - though to date I've only done experiments, and the whole truth as we all know only emerges when the deadline gets close! - is to write individual chapters with Word/Zotero, and do the "formatting" when the text is complete.

    My two main reasons for using Word are
    (i) Zotero's "cite-while-you-write" (may I call it that without getting sued?) is great when writing new material, especially since I moved to keeping all my notes in Zotero too, and using Reports to collect and organise quotes etc.
    (ii) The people I work with are less "technologically comfortable" and find Word daunting enough, so I need to stick with it for communication.

    So far, I've had no problem with the Word/Zotero setup for drafts of chapters and documents up to 10-12K words. (Beyond the usual Word auto-format hassle, and some messiness in maintaining citations across revisions ). I use the Zotero plug-in to generate a bibliography for each chapter.

    For the final version I plan to use FrameMaker, pasting the text and citations into files (one per chapter) within a FrameMaker book, and pasting all the bibliographies into a single "Bibliography" file. I can convert that to a Table, sort it, and convert back to text. I may convert the citations to FrameMaker cross-references (editing the formats appropriately), so I get live links, but that's not too important to me. That leaves me without auto-generation and updating of the Bibliography within FrameMaker, but I think I can live with that.

    I also spent a fair bit of time looking at using TeX (which has definite advantages - much more beautiful layout, free versus $1000, journal acceptance ...), but at the moment that seems just too much hassle and too steep a learning curve, never mind all the messing with BibTex and so on. All in all, IMHO you' should first give up on Windows by moving to UNIX/Linux if you want to use TeX and its relatives.
  • bdarcus
    @JonEP:

    I don't use Word, but my suggestion is to maintain the chapters individually until the end, and then combine them into a single document. Word on a recent-ish computer will have no problem with even a very long dissertation.

    @alandsloane: FM seems like overkill for a dissertation?
  • moeone
    Hi Everyone!

    May I ask a question? I want to write a thesis and I want to do as follows: I want to write introduction and use zotero for citations I do within that Chapter.
    Then I want to write "Methods" in an other word file. An other document so to say. Again I want to use Zotero for citations. I want to continue like this with the whole thesis.
    At the end, I want to put all these chapters together in a single word file via copy and paste. My problem now is, that I doubt Zotero can handle the citations so that I can produce a bibliography at the end. I have this doubt because I already tried to copy a cited text into an other word document. It copied the in-text- citations but was not able to recognise them in the new word document as citations out of which to produce a bibliography.
    So please tell me wether this is possible at all, how I do it or if I have to pursue another strategy.

    Thanks!
  • bdarcus
    Again: a general word question. You need to make sure the fields are copied, so perhaps copy-and-paste isn't the best way.
  • adamsmith
    Zotero can absolutely do this. Copy and paste is fine, but if you paste into a new document you need to either insert one single citation (which you can later delete) or Set the Document Preferences before pasting.
    Alternatively you can just paste everything in after the introduction and save as a new document.
    I have done this successfully and so, I believe, have many others.
  • moeone
    bdarcus and adamsmith, thanks for your help!

    I managed to do what I described. Don´t know why it did not work the other day. It definitly works when there are already cited passages in the document where is copied into.

    Btw: What is a good way to makle sure, the fields are copied? Where can I find information regarding this?
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