Trying out Zotero
I just found out about Zotero when I read this blog post yesterday.
It’s a Firefox extension for managing your literature lists. I’ve been looking for a good tool for this for a bit. My trial period of Papers ran out this week, and I had pretty much decided to buy it, but it only runs on Mac and I (still) have a Linux laptop.
Now, before I decide, I’ll try out Zotero. I will be able to use it both at work and at home (or when travelling). For Papers I’d have to buy a Mac laptop of some kind (but then, I am planning to do that anyway so it is not a major problem).
Zotero also has a nice feature (currently in beta) for synchronising literature lists. Sounds like just the thing I need.
There is plugins for Word and OpenOffice (but of course not the Word 2008 I have on my Mac), to manage references in documents. While I really prefer BibTeX, I guess this is a nice substitute when not working in LaTeX.
I don’t think Zotero exports to BibTeX, though, and that is a bit of a downer… but it is open source, so that could be fixed. There seem to be a plugin for BibTeX here, but it is marked as “invalid” whatever that means.
Anyway, I will try it out for a while, and who knows, it might be my choice instead of Papers.
If it isn’t sued out of existence, of course…
September 28th, 2008 at 8:28 am
Zotero does export to BibTeX. Also exports to MODS, RIS, Zotero RDF, DC RDF, Refer/BibIX and “Wikipedia template”. Just right-click any item in your library and choose “Export selected item”, or you can also export the whole lot.
September 28th, 2008 at 8:40 am
Ah, so it does. Thanks! :)
September 28th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Zotero’s Word 2008 plugin is complete, but it requires Zotero 1.5, which will ship in a few weeks. In the meantime, you can still manually drag references out of Zotero into Word 2008.
September 28th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Thanks for the info, Sean. No worries, I can wait a few weeks :) I mainly use BibTeX anyway.