Zotera?

[AustinFarrerFan]

I am thinking of making the switch to Ubuntu but a lack of biblographic softtware similar to Endnote for Open Office is causing me pause. Has anyone used Zotera that could post about their experiences with it? Is it a good effective program? What are its limitations?

[p_quarles]

I'm assuming that you mean Zotero, the Firefox bibliography extension. (Zotera is a video surveillance system ).

I use Zotero, and I think it's quite good. There are standalone options as well: Bibus and Pybliographique are the ones I can think of.

All three of these can be run in Windows, so it might be worth your while to check them out prior to making the switch.

[AustinFarrerFan]

Yes, I did mean Zotero. Imagine such an obvious mistake in my first post. Thanks for the info.

[Curtisc]

I started using Zotero just this semester, and I think it's pretty good. There's a few quirks in the interface, where things aren't completely intuitive (for example, I haven't figured out how to apply a tag/label to multiple items, and sometimes dragging and dropping between folders doesn't seem to work); however, it does a good job of recognizing that there's a journal article on the page and with a single click you've got your citation. It also exports to bibtex and there's an openoffice plugin, although I don't have any experience with it.

I agree with p_quarles - give it a shot in Windows first, and then you can always copy your library over to linux.

[jraab22]

I've been using zotero for a little while now and am pretty happy with it. I have all my references organized into topic. I also keep a folder that is titled unfiled. As I'm doing a literature search through pubmed or browsing the table of contents of a journal I find a lot of articles I don't have time to read right away. This lets me keep them separate until I get to them. I've had some problems using the open office extensions (numbering of the biblio would get screwed). My work around was to export my file into jabref and use that to insert citations. I haven't tried the newest version of zotero for citations yet so it may be fixed.

[AustinFarrerFan]

Thanks everyone.

Where are the bibliographies stored when you save them?

Can you cite while you write in zotero like you can in Endnote?

[Tharmas]

Yes you can, if you install the MSOffice/OpenOffice.org plugin. It's available on the zotero website.

[surruk51]

Since no one has reported experience with the plug in, I thought I would post mine,

I have used Zotero for three essays for my MSc now, and I am happy with it.

I have installed the Open Office plugin (Using OO3, Ubunto 8.04 and Firefox 3 here). For me it works very well.
I use this sequence of actions a lot, and it works fine.
Write something
Need support
Search the web
Find it
Add to Zotero
Return to essay
pick up reference from Zotero

Problems.

Zotero is not bug free. It sometimes breaks Firefox, and can soak up a lot of cycles, not worked out how that occurs, and will probably leave it to someone else to figure out. However, it has not so far caused me to lose any work.

I am required to use Harvard Referencing, and although there are a multiplicity of ways of doing Harvard, Zotero only offers one. Maybe there are csutom options - I guess I should delve deeper. For now, the tutors will just have to accept that they asked for Harvard, and they got Harvard, even if its not quite the Harvard they were expecting.

All in all, Zotero is a real help to my work, and I would not be without it,

[tgalati4]

Zotero is a huge plug-in. It's geared for serious research. Install a second browser for general web browsing. Zotero can slow things down a bit. It works well otherwise.

[nortexoid]

Zotero is a huge plug-in. It's geared for serious research. Install a second browser for general web browsing. Zotero can slow things down a bit. It works well otherwise.

Did you just make that stuff up? Zotero is not a huge plug-in, and it hasn't slowed down any Firefox installation I've used it on.