Fri 5 Jun 2009
As part of my foray into LaTeX, I started to check out Zotero. I've been a happy EndNote user for years now. Love the Word integration. But it really doesn't play well with LaTeX. The RIS and Bibtex export filters are crap. And, obviously, it doesn't integrate with a LaTeX GUI editor the way it does with Word.
I know many people who sing the praises of Zotero, and I know it does a better job of exporting to Bibtex. But after a few days of using it, I'm done. Granted, I haven't put it through as rigorous a test as I might have, but here are my first impressions:
- Wow does it slow down Firefox. At least for me, there was a noticeable snappiness hit and a big increase in memory footprint with Zotero running.
- It does not seem to do the magic I want it to. I tried to get it to import cites using the "Create New Item from the Current Page" feature, expecting great things. No dice on ACM Portal, IEEE Explore, or ScienceDirect. Maybe I'm not doing it right. The only way I could get it to import a cite was to export a citation for EndNote. Zotero intercepts it and imports. But that's no better than EndNote.
- Zotero still doesn't solve the problem of integration with my LaTeX editor. I have to gather cites in Zotero, export a Bibtex file, then go back to my editor.
So, Zotero is out. I think I'll try JabRef next, which integrates with LatexEDitor.
I'm a big Zotero fan, so I can't help sticking my nose in…
To import citations into Zotero, you want to use the icon that appears at the right side of your address bar. When you're on a site with references that Zotero knows how to read, like say, Google Scholar or EBSCO or whatever, you'll usually get a folder icon or a "printed page" icon. (The "Create new item from current page" thing is more for non-reference-y sites that Zotero doesn't quite know how to interpret in the usual reference-y way.)
When you see the folder icon in your address bar, that means you're on a page with a list of references that Zotero can import. Click on the folder, and select the references you want to import from the list (or pick "Select All").
When you see the "printed page" icon, you're on a page with a single reference. Click on the icon, and your reference is saved.
A couple ways to save the article PDF together with your citation:
- With the PDF open in your browser, select the "Attachments" tab in Zotero for your citation, click on "Add," and select "Take snapshot of current page."
or
- Drag the PDF link onto the Zotero citation.
well, I hope you're not "done" because Zotero makes a big difference. When you create from the current page, you often have to enter the metadata yourself, unless you see an icon in the location bar that is one of the zotero document types.
Have you played with JabRef? With Zotero and JabRef, you never have to edit bibtex again.
I tried nascaradaugther's suggestion. i was able to smoothly download the citation for a paper in sciencedirect, but then when I click on the pdf tab in sciencedirect, it pops up my browser open/download window and so there is no way of 'opening within the browser' as she say. Sciencedirect never makes the pdf link visible. Or am I missing some step here?