Two people working on the same Zotero account?

I am an RA for a professor - if she shares her Zotero password with me, can I access her account from a different computer and make changes?

Would this compromise my own separate/personal Zotero account?
  • Is there a reason you wouldn't share the library instead?
  • Do you mean create a new Group library (by dropping items into it and then sharing)? Or is there a way to share a library directly?
  • Will a new group library not work?
    https://www.zotero.org/support/groups

    Sharing a password seems like a bad idea for several reasons, including that it would be more work to switch between accounts, and then by default everything would be shared not just your overlapping research.
  • edited April 27, 2020
    @tanyamatthan: The normal process would be to use a shared Zotero group that she invited you to, but if the goal is really just to make changes within her personal library and you're the only other person working on it, sharing her account would be an option.

    If you did that, you'd want to set up a separate profile for her library/account, and have Zotero open in one or the other profile while you were using it. (With a single profile, Zotero would have to delete the whole data directory and redownload the other account's data each time you switched between the two.)
  • and then by default everything would be shared not just your overlapping research
    (I'm not sure what @djross3 meant by this, but when you switch accounts, data doesn't get merged.)
  • (Sorry if that was confusing. I just meant that there would be nothing separate in the advisor's account. For example, it would only be this project with this RA, and not any other project with another RA, or similar situations. It's like the difference between forwarding one email message to someone else to read and giving them your password to read all of your emails. But if that's the goal, yes, it would work.)
  • edited April 28, 2020
    (Ah, yes, that's true.)

    @tanyamatthan, to clarify, one downside of using a group for this is that, if she's citing from her personal library in a word processor document, and she dragged those items to a group library, the group library items wouldn't be linked to those citations. We'll likely offer ways in the future to sync items back and forth between libraries, but right now you can only copy an item once in either direction, and to copy it again you have to delete the item in the target library, which means that it's not as good of a solution for letting someone make changes in your own personal library that you've already been working with.
  • Thank you both! This is very helpful!

    I just had one more clarifying question: if she were to share her library, would only she have to set up a separate profile, or would I have to as well? What would the purpose of the separate profile be? I'm not sure I follow what that means exactly.
  • edited April 28, 2020
    No, only you would. The point is just to keep your own library separate from the copy of her library. Otherwise, you'd have to unlink Zotero from one account and relink it with the other every time you switched between the two, which, as I say, requires Zotero to delete all the local data from the first account and redownload all the data for the second account. Instead, you'd just have separate profiles set up for syncing with each account, and they'd each show the correct library.
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