Zotero and Jason Puckett
Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators
Certain librarianish tendencies seem to have stuck for good, despite the fact that I don’t work in a library any more.
Wanting to structure data about publishing/presenting by members of my department’s faculty, I quickly grew rustrated with RefWorks because it doesn’t do NLM citations properly and it doesn’t even have a Ref Type for Presentations. (My view, by the way, is that it is false advertising for RefWorks to claim that it supports NLM. It doesn’t. Not correctly and not thoroughly.)
So I started again looking at Zotero, which I dreaded. The last time I tried it, I found it frustrating and quickly gave up.
This time, though, I had a secret weapon: Jason Puckett. Jason is a friend and I knew he was a sharp and terribly nice guy with great taste- but I had no idea how good his book was.
Jason’s book, Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators is outstanding. I’m a fussy critic of writing, but I loved Jason’s. The structure of the book is simple, the writing is clear and friendly. This book got me up to speed on Zotero much faster than if I’d just relied on the documentation and my own experimentation.
Thanks to this quick start, I discovered that Zotero is far more powerful than RefWorks and accomplishes much more in far less time.
If you ever were curious about Zotero, get the book and start playing with it. If you’re a RefWorks user, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much more powerful Zotero is while still being pretty darn easy to use.
ALA Folks: You can buy a DRM-Free version here.
Medical Libraryfolk: I’m curious. What are your favorite tools for managing bibliographic data? Really, please let me know in the comments or drop me an email. I want to manage the data of all publishing/presentation done by members of our faculty and I’d welcome suggestions of what tools to try.
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November 7th, 2011 at 9:41 am
Now if only I could get the College of Dentistry to let us load anything besides IE on their computers *sigh*
November 7th, 2011 at 10:18 am
I was thinking “oh yeah, I need to order this for the collection.” And then I looked at my email and I had a notification that my “librarian*” saved search for new items in the catalog has been triggered, and that we’d just got Jason’s book.
November 7th, 2011 at 10:45 am
Thank you for the book recommendation. I actually use a few tools: Diigo, Google Docs, and Mendeley. I really like Mendeley for the annotations and highlighting of the PDF document. It is an easy tool to use and has some great tools to help you upload citations. If I remember correctly Zotero is only available in Firefox which is not accessible at most hospitals. Mendeley does have to be downloaded to use the PDF annotations and highlighting, but you can read the documents anywhere and upload from anywhere.
Have you compared Zotero and Mendeley? If so why did you go with Zotero?
I also looked at qiqqa which is a new tool that also incorporates brainstorming features. It is neat but I worry about the stability of the product. It does sync with Mendeley and I really do like the brainstorming features. I’ve been using Mendeley to store and collect notes for developing Order Set, policy, and guideline development. As I continue to use Mendeley for researching Order Sets and compiling data I am now thinking of re-evaluating Qiqqa.
How are you compiling the list of papers? Do your colleagues submit them to you? Or do you have to search and build? I have been looking at doing this but it would require me searching and compiling the list of published works for thousands of colleagues. As a solo it is just not possible right now. So do you have any suggestions?
~Alisha
November 7th, 2011 at 11:22 am
Diigo and GDocs are useless for the extraction and structuring of bibliographic data, but I use ‘em both for other stuff.
I’ve used Mendeley for a long while, but have found Zotero to be both more flexible in importing data from more sites and *much* quicker in extracting that data to my local database.
Perhaps more importantly, the fact that Zotero is open source makes me more confident that it will be around for a good long while…and I can adapt it to my needs if it doesn’t quite do what I want it to. Del.icio.us is dead, some of the Google Services I liked are gone. I’m not confident yet that Mendeley will having staying power.
I’ve played with Qiqqa, but found it to be primarily for organizing collections of PDFs…which isn’t really what I want to do. I just want to organize the bibliographic data.
Compilation began with searches in multiple databases by institutional/department affiliation- and I’m checking this against a list provided by a department researcher.
When it comes to THOUSANDS of colleagues, I dunno’. I’ve only got about 45 faculty members to worry about. It wasn’t hard to run my searches, import the citations, then eliminate duplicates.
November 7th, 2011 at 11:30 am
Oh- forgot to mention: You can use Zotero in Safari or Chrome now through the stand-alone application and a “connector.” http://www.zotero.org/support/3.0#zotero_standalone
November 7th, 2011 at 2:22 pm
@Abs- Looks like they’re working on a connector for Internet Explorer.
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/19644/internet-explorer-connector-is-still-planned/
November 8th, 2011 at 3:56 pm
Zotero Standalone has worked very well for me with Chrome. I prefer it to Mendeley mainly because importing is easier (not one at a time like the Medeley Web Importer) and because you can set it to fetch full text through SFX. Open source is also a big plus. RefWorks is awful, but I use it to send search results through shared folders since it requires nothing from the recipient of the link.
November 8th, 2011 at 6:36 pm
We are an IE only place so we really don’t use Zotero in a large way. The College of Medicine students do for their portfolios and I think the reason the College wanted them to use it was because it played nice with their class management system or it had APIs that could be adapted to the class management system.
The institution does not use Zotero as a whole most of our researchers and writers use EndNote, RefMan and RefWorks. Of those three it really depends on the person’s tastes and what journals they primarily submit to. There are journal publishers that want their submitted manuscripts to specifically use EndNote. I don’t know how they can tell if you use something else, maybe it is in the coding, but they say that their manuscript submission systems do better with EndNote. Again I don’t know how much of that is true or not.
I don’t see people really branching off to other bib. management systems primarily for two reasons, the publisher manuscript edict that they use a specific program and as a creatures of comfort they use what they are familiar with.
On a somewhat related note I am seeing more people using Dropbox to hold PDFs and other things. I think people are doing it more with conferences or when they travel and see something cool. They drop it all in for that subject/conference/trip.
November 9th, 2011 at 11:23 am
I don’t understand what it means that “the institution does not use Zotero as a whole…” given that these are free personal productivity tools. I’ve not heard of a publisher insisting on a particular citation manager, and it doesn’t make much sense that they would care – is this true? I think researchers are moving to Zotero and Mendeley (for good reason) to the extent that EndNote and RefWorks will struggle to survive. We’ll see.
November 10th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
Well Stephen, if your institution is IE and locks down its computers so that nobody can install anything, including Firefox or Chrome then as a whole the institution really doesn’t use Zotero since it currently doesn’t work with IE.
The publisher insisting on a particular citation manager hit me about 2 years ago. I had a research call me about EndNote and when I suggested other products he said the important journal in his field require they use EndNote. I can’t remember the journal anymore but I was skeptical at the time and I remember looking up the journal’s instructions for authors and it did say they preferred authors to use EndNote. Perhaps things have changed, it has been 2 years a lot has happened in this area.