Where my Zotero time goes

Andrew Moylan
For me, Zotero is a time-saver. I care only about how much time it saves in the process of exploring the literature, annotating and storing it, sharing it with others, and referencing it in articles.

Further to the post at http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/308/: It happened: I accidentally or otherwise regrettably deleted one or more items, which I must now manually re-add. This inevitable incident propelled "re-creating accidentally or otherwise regrettably deleted items" to a prominent place on the "Total time spent in Zotero doing tasks that are, in principle, automatable or avoidable" leaderboard, compiled for fun below.

The Total time spent in Zotero doing tasks that are, in principle, automatable or avoidable leaderboard
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~2 minutes per day: Renaming non-standard journal titles, author names, fully-capitalised article titles, etc., so that the Zotero library, when exported to BibTeX, is useful in preparing papers for publication. See http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/516/standardising-journal-names/.

~25 minutes total: Re-creating accidentally or otherwise regrettably deleted items.

~2 minutes per day: Locating and manually attaching and renaming full text PDFs for articles.

~20 seconds per day: Quickly clicking that [-] button many times to remove automatically added tags from articles scraped from ISI Web of Science.

~10 minutes total: Compiling this leaderboard. Oops.
  • jimdelaney
    I agree. In fact, after having tried to work in Zotero, I last week moved back to Bibdesk and Notebook on OSX. Zotero is just a little to clunky for now, and requires too much fiddiling. But I will certainly keep my eye on future releases.
  • ransomca
    I just spent about 15 minutes reformatting the bibliography. Now I have to go back and add in the references that Zotero truncated to "et al."
  • siya
    last week i spend very much time searching on the web for references that i had already collected with zotero and imported to endnote. some abstracts and most of the links to the websites were missing so i had to look again for each reference - which was quite annoying (i usually perform a search first and read through the abstracts later - so i really need direct links to pubmed or fulltext).
    at the moment, switching from endnote is not an option but i like the idea of zotero and i hope it will improve in future.
  • dloranz
    jmdelane - I was wondering if you're reference to Notebook meant the Circus Ponies app. I'd be interested in you're workflow involving BibDesk and Notebook.
  • jimdelaney
    Actually, I said Notebook for some strange reason, but I meant Tinderbox. I have no idea what my fingers were thinking at the time...
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