Zotero 8(www.zotero.org)
172 pointsby bouchard6 hours ago17 comments
  • ashton3142 hours ago
    I have nothing bug praise for Zotero. Zotero is absolutely essential to my workflow as a researcher, second only to Emacs. Without Zotero, I would be spending inordinate amounts of time keeping all my papers + associated citation information organized. Zotero just takes care of it all. I love the iOS app—I read and markup papers on my iPad and everything gets synced smoothly.

    I've been a paying member for a few years now. Part of it is for the storage (PDF packrat here) but mostly because I want to support development. Please consider supporting them if they help you in your work—they're worth it. https://www.zotero.org/storage

  • tony_cannistra4 hours ago
    > Zotero is open source and developed by an independent, nonprofit organization that has no financial interest in your private information. With Zotero, you always stay in control of your own data.

    Refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.

    • ulnarkressty3 hours ago
      Right up until one tries to set up a self-hosted server (spoiler - you can't, at least not without 'significant effort' - they themselves say that if you ask about it).
      • bonsai_spool2 hours ago
        I haven't had an issue doing this with a standard WebDAV server and this has been true since 2007 or so.
        • pseudalopexan hour ago
          Did you sync all data to multiple computers without a Zotero account? Zotero's documentation said WebDAV could sync attachment files. But everything else required a Zotero account.[1]

          [1] https://www.zotero.org/support/sync

        • ajb2 hours ago
          My understanding is that that works for personal use. If you want to use a group library, not so much. Which can be considered fair, as mostly organisations which should be able to help fund zotero are the ones that need group libraries.
        • wycx2 hours ago
          I had a very convenient setup using linked files stored in Dropbox that worked very well for 15 years. The Zotero 6 to 7 upgrade completely broke this, and modified the database so that rollback is not possible. There was no warning that this workflow would be completely broken on upgrade.
          • hermanzegermanan hour ago
            Last Time I tried to store the Database in a Cloud Synced Folder there were like 100 warnings to click away that exactly this would happen...
        • mxuribe2 hours ago
          Is there any documentation for self-hosting that you can share or point to? Um, maybe my brain is not working today...but it sure is hell is not obvious where the instructions are for setting up a self-hosted instance. :-)
      • gdevenyi3 hours ago
        Or try to build it yourself.
      • einpoklum3 hours ago
        Is this intentional crippling / obfuscation, or did they just bother to do the necessary work for the server-side software robust enough to run on different HW & SW setups?
    • bayindirh4 hours ago
      Personally I use Zotero with my own WebDAV server for sync. Works as advertised, without a hitch.
      • pseudalopexan hour ago
        Did you sync all data to multiple computers without a Zotero account? Zotero's documentation said WebDAV could sync attachment files. But everything else required a Zotero account.[1]

        [1] https://www.zotero.org/support/sync

        • jmhammondan hour ago
          I do both. I have the Zotero account for the library and webdav for the pdf files.
          • pseudalopex16 minutes ago
            The question was could all data be synced without a Zotero account.
    • 3 hours ago
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  • whimsicalism4 hours ago
    I highly recommend everyone to use Zotero. Their original marketing as being 'for academics' is entirely wrong and it is a first-in-class bookmark/knowledge manager.

    There are many software recommendations that seem sort of hype-y: Obsidian, Notion, Keybase, etc. Zotero is not that and is a daily driver for me for years. It has also replaced Calibre for me although YMMV there.

    • erredois14 minutes ago
      Do you pay for their sync or self host? If self host, what do you use?
    • kens2 hours ago
      I second the recommendation for Zotero, especially if you find yourself buried under PDFs. Two things make it very useful for me. First, it organizes my PDFs and lets me search them, instead of manually searching through directories. Second, it has an OCR plugin, so I can OCR old PDFs and search the text.
  • kstrauser4 hours ago
    My kid was talking about all the papers they had to cite in their college class. I started to suggest that they check out Zotero, but they stopped me to explain that their teachers already had them all using it.

    Thank you for getting the kids started off on the right foot, professor!

  • malshe4 hours ago
    If you use Zotero regularly and can afford it, please consider becoming a paying member.

    https://www.zotero.org/getinvolved

  • dakiol5 hours ago
    I've been using Zotero as my "book" organizer. I have all my epubs, pdfs, everything there. Since version 7 I think you can read PDFs within Zotero, and I love it. I keep custom labels so I easily search for stuff. The only feature I don't use is everything about citation (funny enough). Before Zotero I had everything in file system directories, but I wanted the feeling of having one place (one app) where I could see all my books by category, by read/no-read, etc.

    Having said this, I will probably wait a bit before upgrading to V8 (since I use it everyday, so I wouldn't like to face bugs and the like)

    • itsrobreally4 hours ago
      My experience with Zotero was similar - I tried adding my ebook library to it as an alternative to Calibre because I really want to sort of categorize and easily reference my books and/or get like library call number groupings which is not trivial with Calibre.

      I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre.

      Someday I will write an indexer with either a web search tool or an LLM interface to better find info on my books but for now I just spend too much time browsing through the files which makes me sad (but not sad enough yet to overcome the laziness)

  • dhash5 hours ago
    Post Mendeley shutdown, zotero has been an awesome replacement (while not being controlled by Elsevier). Given the amount of PDF's that I see during researchy times in my life, it's been an absolute godsend. Highly reccommend!
  • trostaft3 hours ago
    Love Zotero, have been using it since I started out as a researcher. I've found the PDF view to have noticeably more lag than either preview or skim, but I can live with that for entire package (and can just open the papers in those readers).
  • Scene_Cast23 hours ago
    I discovered it a few weeks ago. It solved my problem of having a hundred arxiv tabs open. Highly recommended. I'm also looking forward to trying out the new annotations feature.
  • catgirlinspace2 hours ago
    Coincidentally, I was just looking at using Zotero on Linux this morning after having used it previously on Mac for some classes.
  • rossant2 hours ago
    Zotero had been “not good enough” for many years. Since version 7, it has become nearly perfect for me. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
  • ricksunny4 hours ago
    I hope they've fixed the stability issues for Zotero's Google Docs plugin when citation count gets in excess of 100+. It's a special kind of terror when the bibliography breaks and fails tracking with superscripts in the text body. The resulting necessary 'save early, save often' behavior results in accumulating hundreds of manuscript versions till submission.
  • smuenkel3 hours ago
    Honestly the piece of software in my life that I have the least issues with ever. So so good.
  • majkinetor4 hours ago
    Zotero is very good nowadays. Its unbearably slow though, and it doesn't seem this will ever get better.
    • mft_3 hours ago
      Could you share how/when it is slow? We’re considering using this at work and I’d love your feedback.
  • Tomte5 hours ago
    I‘ve been using it as a general bookmark manager (think Pinboard or Raindrop) for a while now. It‘s a bit quirky, but very powerful with all the management and annotation possibilities.

    You might say it was just another excuse to curate my thousands of bookmarks and recreate a new tagging structure yet again, but… well, you wouldn‘t be wrong. :-)

  • zvr2 hours ago
    Another enthusiastic Zotero user here. Current library has 13,775 items and for a low yearly price one can have multi-device sync and support the project. I'm also syncing to a server I own, for complete data ownership (just in case).
  • throwaway_242424 hours ago
    amazing tool thank you
    • ifh-hnan hour ago
      > amazing tool thank you

      This is a sneaky edit completely different from the original post I replied to, which was about how bloated zotero was and how the op had uni stalled immediately and gone back to text files on disk.

    • vitorsr4 hours ago
      Zotero is built on top of Firefox ESR.
    • ifh-hn4 hours ago
      Im unaware of another open source tool that provides all zotero does that's lighter weight. I can guarantee it's better than using text files on disk.
      • mxuribe2 hours ago
        Hi @ifh-hn , would you mind sharing what features you feel might make zotero better than text files on a disk? I'm genuinely interested to learn.

        I've heard of zotero maybe a year or so ago, and was curious about it, but never took the plunge. I manage the bulk of my info/knowledge base across mostly locally-saved text files, with a few other tidbits leveraging PDFs and word process files (.odt, .docx)...and really i only use the latter for pasting in screenshots. And, then of course simply synching them across devices using syncthing.

        While my approach works great for the majority of the time, i can imagine there might be some functions that some other tools might bring me which i might be missing...I suppose one thing that i lack is a graph of linkages for content that might live in different, separate files but might be related, etc. So, would you be willing to share your opinion, experience for what makes zotero better than text files on a disk? :-) Thanks!

        • ifh-hnan hour ago
          I use it in an academic sense. I use it browser plugin to one click capture a source. Zotero mostly automatically identifies the source type, author, and other metadata. It can retrieve metadata directly from files like pdfs too. Further it has ability to retrieve metadata from ISBN, doi, and other identifiers. It can export these sources to really any citation style and also integrates with other software for this purpose. It has a plugin system for extras too.

          I have nothing against text files on the disk but zotero is simply much better as a knowledge/source manager.

      • 4 hours ago
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