online citation sharing

Schamess
Just checking if there are still plans underway for an online server for Zotero. It's nice to have it as a personal reference manager but I would also love to be able to share tags and citations with others, generate rss feeds for my tags, etc. in the way that social bookmarking sites do.

Of course, there's Connotea, but it doesn't have the built-in reference manager function. What would be really great, would be a Zotero/Connotea collaboration, allowing upload of Zoreto citations to Connotea...

I know, easy for me to say. But it would revolutionize reading and sharing of scientific literature...
  • noksagt
    Yes, the zotero devs will have an online server.

    There's also been talk of a utility (plugin) to more easily sync with Connotea. If you "can't wait" & Connotea isn't sufficient, refbase or CiteULike might be (both have RSS, keywords/tags, and other reference management features).
  • Schamess
    Thanks! That's very helpful. I will check out both sites.
  • sjaved1
    Online sharing would be great. I am currentlu studying for my degree and am using Zotero voth at home and at university. It would be very beneficial to me if I could see the referances that i have gathered on my home computer on my university computer and visa versa.
  • Roos
    This is what I am waiting for. If Zotero has this feature... there's no stop to it :)
  • jonwong
    Actually you can just export a list of your articles and such in the RIS format. Then go onto Connotea, and upload the file. It should be able to upload your tags also.

    I guess it would be even nicer to have a one-click feature to do this. Perhaps if I have time I'll take a stab at writing a plugin for zotero.
  • ftr
    Online sharing of the references is what really lacks. I would like to introduce Zotero into the European COST 298 research network, but as the collaborative side is still underdeveloped there is no sense in pushing in favour of using Zotero.

    Regards
    ftr
  • ftr
    I tried to export my Zotero data base to Connotea to allow sharing with my colleagues but have stopped.

    The export via the RIS, MODS formats distorts non-ascii text.

    As we are a European research network working with citations not limited to the small set of English-language publications using Connotea simply can not be recommended.

    Another major additional obstacle :
    Connotea demands a detectable URI, PMID, DOI, or ASIN information to integrate the record in your Connotea base.
    Older books don't have an URI, as far as I see.
    DOI concerns US publications
    PubMed concerns PubMed citations of life sciences and biomedical scientific journal articles.
    ASIN emands that Amazon curently sells you. This is not the case for university publications that are published by the research institutions - and there are lots.

    So sharing your citations through Conotea is NOT a solution.

    ftr
  • Matthias
    Hi ftr,
    DOI concerns US publications
    AFAIK, this is not correct, there are many non-US publications that have a DOI. However, I agree with you that Connotea's restriction to records with a detectable URI, PMID, DOI, or ASIN is a major abstacle.

    Note that, until the upcoming Zotero server offers something more tightly integrated with the Zotero desktop app, you might want to use one of the other web-based applications that allow you to share accademic references. Some of them are listed here:

    http://bibliophile.sourceforge.net/projects.php

    Most of these apps are meant to be installed on your own server, though.
  • bbolker
    Does anyone have any further recommendations in the last six
    months? I saw Zotz/Citeline and was very excited, but not only
    is it broken at the moment, it doesn't really do "collaborative" --
    it's really a one-way, single-user system. I will probably go
    with Connotea (the RIS upload is a nice idea, although it will
    be problematic when Zotero fails to scrape a DOI), but would
    welcome any other ideas.

    Probably don't have the option of setting something up on our
    own server. Will avoid MyEndnoteWeb for philosophical reasons ...

    Ben Bolker
  • Lycimnius
    Zotero's online profiles offer one option for sharing citations, but the privacy settings are still too rudimentary to be useful. You can either share your whole library or none of it. It would be nice to be able to share specific collections. The list of disciplines is also too general to be useful in finding people.
  • bdarcus
    Search the forums and you'll see your first issue has been discussed. As for your second, it's easy to critique, but not helpful. How about suggesting specific additions?
  • Lycimnius
    Apologies. I'm having trouble searching the forums effectively. The nearest I can find to the first issue is an unanswered comment by Jonadon in http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/6178/collapse-collections-hierarchy-for-my-library-online/
    But I'm sure expanded sharing settings are on the way. It will be nice to be able to decide not just which collections are visible but who gets to see them (an important consideration in using Zotero with a group of students).

    As for the second issue, one suggestion would simply be to expand the number of disciplines by creating sub-disciplines. For example, knowing who is working on "Literature" is not as helpful to me as knowing who is working on "Renaissance non-dramatic literature" or "early modern ecocriticism." It might also be helpful to search for very specific things such as "who is working on Milton's sonnets?".. but I think that might best be handled with tags.

    I'm really excited by the potential to share research this way. If it becomes widely used it will be like a Facebook for thinking people, and it has the potential to change the way academic work is done.
  • bdarcus
    Sharing settings (tied to groups and such) are on the way.

    Re: fields and such, I think groups and tags are a better way to do this; more flexible. The generic fields are currently drawn from the CSL schema, where they're used to group citation styles. So, for example, in the future it'll be easier to find journal styles in your specific field.
  • kanzure
    Maybe you want to check out mendeley- it imports various bibliography formats, but also does optical character recognition (OCR) on PDFs [that it already has a template for or something]. The mendeley website and software platform then is made to allow sharing of citations and references between people in 'shared groups'. However, I am not sure if it transfers the PDFs with the references that are added to the 'shared' group. Also, I have had bad experiences with the OCR functionality, although it does sometimes seem to find a DOI on a page and then inform itself about the metadata by looking up the DOI if it's unable to parse the paper title and authors etc. So, there's some potential there. Mendeley, however, is not open source.

    - Bryan
    http://heybryan.org/
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