Possible future of Zotero as a personal knowledge base.

wolfsonliu
Except for the reference management functions, the notes in Zotero is very powerful now. You can add citations to the notes, and cite the notes itself, group and tag the notes. So, Zotero is capable of being used as OneNote, Notion and so on. However, the potential of Zotero as a notebook software is still hidden behind the reference management.

I think make the notebook function more prominent and independent can help a lot. It would be a possible future direction for the development of Zotero.

And Zotero would have the functions of a personal knowledge base:
1. notes and notebooks (including citation functions, figure, structure)
2. reference management (library, citation, snapshots, and view of PDF and other format),
3. knowledge sharing (online shared library, single note or notebook sharing)
4. knowledge storage (both local and cloud storage of notebooks, reference libraries and so on).
  • brianjd
    edited July 1, 2023
    +1

    100% agree. I think Zotero has already solved the hardest problem in building a personal knowledge management tool: the capture and representation of citation information. None of the other personal knowledge management tools (and I've tried OneNote, Evernote, SimpleNote, Obsidian, Joplin, Notion, Logseq, Google Keep) do this well, if at all. What most of them do: noting, notebooking, tagging, in-linking. That stuff is relatively easy. And Zotero is already 90% of the way there.

    Of the group of personal knowledge management tools, my favorite is Obsidian. It has a few killer features:

    - markdown-based notes
    - ability to add custom fields via YAML-headers
    - ability to query your entire vault on-the-fly using SQL-style queries (with the Dataview plugin)

    If Zotero had these features, that'd be game over for me. I would buy an extra monitor just to keep a Zotero window open all day.

    I don't mean to trivialize the work it would take to get Zotero to this point. It would be very hard. It's just that Zotero is closer to this point than any of these other tools. Yet, I rarely see Zotero mentioned as a straight-up competitor with these tools.
  • birkland
    I agree that Zotero is nearing the point where it might serve as a personal knowledge manager for a lot of people. But like brianjd, I am enjoying learning and using Obsidian. I see the two platforms as fulfilling different goals: Zotero as a reference manager and a reader that lets me extract notes from PDFs, mostly, and Obsidian as a way of processing those notes and arranging them in ways that I cannot in Zotero. I am concerned that if we tried to add some features to Zotero, such as a tag-based note graphic system, there'd be some drift away from what seems to be the central mission of Zotero, which is to provide the best reference manager for writers and scholars. That it is! And the version 6 release, with the built-in PDF reader and the ability to extract notes from annotations baked into the software, is amazing. Perhaps the only new feature I'd want to make this integrate better with my Obsidian workflow is the addition of built in BetterBIbTex citation keys. But the add on handles this well. I would be very interested to hear what others think about Zotero as a PKM platform, either standalone or as part of a workflow with other apps.
  • LeighAnne77
    Thank you, Zotero team, for what you have built - I cannot wait to see how Zotero can become the base for a large amount of knowledge base tools.
  • powelstock
    I echo the thanks for what Zotero has become! It's astonishing, really. IMO, Zotero is two tiny steps away from having at least as much power as a PKM as, say, Citavi:
    (1) make it possible to include notes, highlights, etc., in collections (which is powerful in Citavi); and (2) make it possible to insert these knowledge items verbatim into a document (together with the source), just as you can do now with references. Doesn't seem very hard (caveat: not a programmer!), and I think this would please a lot of users!
  • powelstock
    PS: Tags are not as powerful as Collections in this regard, because they are not hierarchical. I use the PKM in Citavi to create outlines and drafts of research papers.
  • grant.blank
    I strongly endorse this idea. Zotero is now very close to being a general-purpose personal knowledge base. I can, for example, use it as a recipe database or to store class notes. Just a few additional features, like many mentioned in this thread, would make it extremely powerful.
Sign In or Register to comment.