Deciding between Zotero and Mendeley
Hello,
I have trouble deciding between the two. It is for my law thesis and I will be working with a lot of pdfs on different computers. I want to be able to eeeeasily annotate + cite them. I tried RefWorks but it felt too slow. Everyone recommends Mendeley since apparently it is a lot snappier. What do you guys say pro/con wise?
I have trouble deciding between the two. It is for my law thesis and I will be working with a lot of pdfs on different computers. I want to be able to eeeeasily annotate + cite them. I tried RefWorks but it felt too slow. Everyone recommends Mendeley since apparently it is a lot snappier. What do you guys say pro/con wise?
On the other hand, here in the Zotero forum, if you follow a bit, you can see how helpful people are, advice and troubleshooting is fast and bugfixes for the software can happen within hours/days.
Neither Zotero nor Mendeley is particularly well set up for the intricacies of legal citation and neither has certain reference types like treaties that might be important to you. Juris-M adds these. I believe Zotero will get some of these in the future, but I don’t know when. (I am not affiliated with any of these programs.)
FWIW I do quite a bit of legal writing and have to cite relatively obscure jurisdictions and for that I use Bookends and use Zotero more for collaborative writing and teaching.
I read about Zotfile but that is a workaround no?
@inh3 interesting, is that also European / civil law ?
Re: the legal stuff, I'd recommend you look at Juris-m to see if that works. The Geneva Graduate Institute also has a pretty helpful guide for how to make Zotero work for international law, which might be helpful. Personally, I tend to cite international law or specific African jurisdictions, so I do not really know about European/Civil law.
For the more rarefied situations, I use Bookends because it allows you to customize reference types (so I have a specific reference type for treaties, one for UN docs, one each for various West African jurisdictions, and so on). As far as I know, only Bookends (Mac only), Citavi (Windows only), and EndNote (nominally cross-platform but basically unusable on Mac) allow you to customize reference types.
But if you can make Zotero work for you w/o that, it is probably the more seamless solution (and you have the benefit of your money not going to some large corporation, unlike Mendeley).
On a more positive note, if any of your needs include BibTeX, or RMarkdown, Zotero plus plugins (full disclosure: one of those plugins is mine) give you for free (open source even, all of it) what others don't give you at any cost.
And I'm willing to stake money on that my support is better than Mendeleys'. Free.
Type: treaty
That will be cited correctly for styles supporting treaty citation.
1.a. I played around with both Mendeley and Zotero. When I drag+dropped a pdf in Mendeley Desktop and highlighted it, I could open the M-pdf via M's cloud and it included the highlight.
1.b. When I drag+dropped a pdf into Zotero Desktop and I tried opening the pdf, it opened the pdf with my own Foxit pdf software (as expected?). So I highlighted the Z-pdf, I closed Zotero Desktop and I went to Zotero's online version to take a look. But then the pdf opened in my chrome browser (instead of Foxit) AND there was no highlighting! What's going on here?
Also I noticed it does not save it as a reference when dragging + dropping the pdf but rather as a 'file', if that makes sense. I tried to go through the documentation but it only made matters more confusing? In Mendeley it automatically becomes a citation with a pdf (even though most of the citations are wrong since theyre not files with identifiers sometimes)
2. How good is Zotero in searching the pdf content? I've heard Mendeley is pretty good at indexing the content within the PDF and I can easily search for the content.
(PS: I'm not interested in possible perks they have regarding collab or sharing. It's just my own stuff for my master thesis and possible postdoc)
@inh3 Also, regarding Juris-M, it could be interesting but since I'll mostly work with Dutch law i'm not sure if it is truly more useful than zotero, I am guessing you mostly use international law?
One other thing: since Mendeley and Zotero use the same underlying citation mechanism (CSL), their support for legal research out of the box should be about the same, but with the important caveat that Zotero pulls in stuff from the extra field, as @bwiernik mentioned above (thanks for the reminder about this!). I don't think Mendeley has anything like that. So from a legal writing point of view, and disregarding the various issues re: data, privacy, corporate behavior, etc (which all would tilt in favor of Zotero, I'd say), Mendeley is at best equal to Zotero and in actuality probably a bit worse. (I think Paperpile, which also uses CSL, has a few more reference types baked into their interface so assuming that you use the right CSL style, it can produce proper citations equivalent to the use of Zotero's extra field. But I am guessing that Juris-M would be superior still).
That said, legal referencing is notoriously complex (hence the Juris-M fork) and I do not know if any software out there handles it flawlessly. But in my experience with "vanilla" Zotero (not even Juris-M) and for my uses, Zotero gets me 90% of the way there and the minor issues I fix manually (I also work a lot with Chicago [author-date], which requires legal sources in footnotes independently of the references cited list, which makes things a bit easier). I can only think of one time where we had to use an obscure South African legal format and cited cases from the African human rights system that it really broke down and we ended up doing citations manually.
- Regarding sync: I found out what was going wrong. Apparently my Zotero does not sync automatically after changes (not instantly). What happened was I highlighted it in Zotero Desktop but the last sync was 30min ago. Highlighting and manually pressing 'sync' works. Is there any method to make the sync 'continuous'? Because I can predict that this is going to be something I will forget hah.
- Regarding parent items: I think I understand. When Zotero does not recognise the metadata it does not 'guess' a citation for it, but leaves it as purely a pdf? And so I have to right click and make a parent/citation for it ?
That's kind of annoying since for one or other reason most European national law papers seem to be almost DOI averse. Why, I've got no idea but the majority of the Dutch papers I use seem to be without any metadata.
To be fair though Mendeley's "forcing" a citation is just a annoying, I have no idea how Mendeley's algorithm works but some of my papers got turned into Chinese/Asian script citations for one or other reason. (RefWorks seems to be the best at 'guessing' or identifying keywords for a reference, but I find RefWorks a bit sluggish in usage)
@inh3 I looked at Juris-M, but to be honest I did not see a particular advantage (compared to regular Zotero) to it for Dutch law. Am I missing something?
edit: This problem doesn't happen with Zotero unless the source itself has bad metadata. I still see this when importing directly from Google Scholar instead of following the link to the publisher and importing metadata from the publisher's site.
2. You have control of your databases,
3. If you delete your databases by accident you're toast! Backup backup backup! You could purchase and setup a schedule backup with Macrium Reflect! OR a simple windows batch/vb script! OR just be mindful of your databases and backup regularly!
4. You can setup Zotero to move and use databases on ANY of your local drives
5. You can setup Zotero to move and use databases on a NAS (network attached storage) device and still work remotely. It's a little work, but it's worth the effort!
6. You are not required to log into Zotero to use the software, unless you save and sync your data on Zotero services.
7. Plugin's work (Browser extensions, Microsoft Office extensions, etc)
8. Zotero has a working development team and is constantly being updated.
9. You have tons of community support here if you are patient, which, certainly not Microsoft's inexperienced scripted support.
10. All of the above...
1. Mendeley YOU own nothing and have no control of any of YOUR DATA.
2. Mendeley's support is worthless.