Limitations of Zotero

When I showed Zotero some some of our scientists, their first reaction was "looks great but can it format my references and bibilography as desired?" The answer was no and that was the end of their interest.
Imperial College has a site license for endNote and with the pressure scientists are under, there is no way they will consider switching unless the same functionality is available.
Our Librarian and myself thougt we would see if we could design our own styles. We looked at the sqlite records in the database and at the guide on http://xbiblio.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xbiblio/csl/doc/tutorial.txt?view=markup; sadly it was too complicated for us.
This is not really a gripe; I'm just making the Zotero peolpe aware of limitations that are preventing the uptake of a good product.
  • edited September 29, 2007
    Everyone here is aware of this limitation. It will just take some time to resolve. The csledit.xul interface has been mentioned here many times, and is a good first step.

    Oh, and the tutorial you link to isn't finished, so it's not surprising it's not very helpful. If you have any suggestions of what you'd like to see there, let me know.
  • I know it is an obvious statement but what is available is aimed at developers. E.g. our librarian is a layout expert, has a basic knowledge of xml and would find it very easy to incert a new record into a database; at the same time she is very busy.
    For the existing tutorial to become a guide it would need to become a simpler overview to modifying a template.

    I feel the following is missing -

    - examples. The tutorial could pick a layout and show what a reference would look like in Word. It could then show changes required to an existing record. As formatting tend to be different for each type of reference, examples could be given for a reference to a journal, a book and/or an URL.
    To cater for people who is uncertain about xlst, you could point to other websites e.g. http://w3schools.com/xsl/xsl_choose.asp.

    - A list of possible variables/parameters would also be sensible. E.g. in the tutorial we are refering to, it gives an example for a book - what is the id for a journal article or a magazine article?

    There are other possibilities - a small example on how to transform using a third party product; if there are a number of layouts around which couldn't make it into the released software, they could be listed or referenced on some page; the same goes for any tools.
  • The lack of properly formatted output also prevents me from trusting Zotero as the only reference managing program. I use it for data aquisition. For final output I transfer a collection to a windows computer with Endnote installed. So personally I am quite happy with Zotero, however, I do not recommend this procedure to any of our students.
    I have watched Zotero's improvements for some time now - its really impressive. Even the creation of styles has become much easier now, see
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1158/creating-a-citation-style/#Item_0 .
    I think Zotero's inability to output abbreviated journal titles is an important hindrance for people who want to create a style. bdarcus has outlined how it should be done on the CSL side ( http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1305/ ) and in version 1.0.0rc4.r1735, the National-Library-of Medicine style already contains <text variable="container-title" suffix=". " form="short"/>, but Zotero still disregards the short form. So it is still "European journal of cell biology" instead of "Eur J Cell Biol" as scraped from NCBI PubMed or "Eur. J. Cell Biol." as desired.
    Regards
    Michael
  • - examples. The tutorial could pick a layout and show what a reference would look like in Word.
    Good point, though I won't be showing what it looks like "in Word." CSL is completely agnostic about how it's used, and I actually started on all of this to free myself from Word (and Endnote).

    But, the plan is to have two documents for CSL: a proper (and more formal) specification, and a tutorial. The two together will cover what you're looking for.

    However, the focus will remain primarily developers, because I want to see GUIs built such that users don't have to deal with the XML directly. But there ought to be a way to make it possible for ambitious users to work it out.

    Michael, yes, Zotero needs to deal with abbreviation. But it's a non-trivial problem to do it right. For example, your "preferred form" is in fact style-specific. Other styles no doubt would prefer the punctuation left off. Also, it seems to me the solution ought to also encompass other kinds of abbreviation, such as organization names.

    It would be nice to see the Zotero 2.0 functionality include functionality that can ease this. Periodicals really need to be treated as a first class citizen there, complete with canonical abbreviations.
  • edited September 30, 2007
    It would be nice to see the Zotero 2.0 functionality include functionality that can ease this. Periodicals really need to be treated as a first class citizen there, complete with canonical abbreviations.
    I believe this is planned for the hierarchical items model, where a periodical could be its own item type and the abbreviation could be set just once for all articles in the same journal.

    At that point, it would be great to add a field "abbreviation" to all "reference" item types. This field would be automatically populated with standard journal abbreviations but could then be customized by users. In cases when a journal is used repeatedly, authors may prefer to abbreviate periodicals in a customized way (i.e. PIRE instead of Proceedings of the IRE in the case of the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers). This would also help in the case mentioned on forums when a particular book is abbreviated by the author--this often happens in literary criticism. Archival collections, too, could be abbreviated in this way once they have its own item type, making it easier to cite manuscripts and letters from the same archive--such citations as a rule only use full name of the collection once, and abbreviate in all subsequent cases.
  • Series Titles also need to be able to be abbreviated. (Would it be possible to add place for it in the database/UI even now?)

    And it's probably worth adding to this discussion that the use of abbreviations for some fields will depend on the preference of the author (/editor/publisher) with respect to the particular writing project. A literary critic who abbreviates a title for one project where it is central will want to use normal citation for the same title in a case where it is cited less frequently. This might be usefully incorporated into the UI. (Something like custom abbreviation lists which override canonical abbreviations, and could include abbreviations for any of the above fields: Journal Title, Series Title, Archival Collections, Main Item Title, organization, publisher).
  • "However, the focus will remain primarily developers..."

    Whatever approach is taken, as long as the appropriate styles/layouts are not available, potential users cannot switch from packages like Endnote.
  • Whatever approach is taken, as long as the appropriate styles/layouts are not available, potential users cannot switch from packages like Endnote.
    Is it really necessary to keep repeating this? Most of us involved in this work are publishing scholars and former Endnote users. We understand the problems perfectly well. Be patient please.
  • I'm sorry if I repeated something that has been flogged to death elsewhere and I'm glad to hear that you understand the problem.
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