Erwin's StarOffice Tango

What are your experiences with Zotero?
I just came across this blog entry about Zotero, where it says:
"When you visit a website like ScienceDirect, and start reading a paper, a little icon will appear on the address bar. Click it and Zotero will save the citation information to its library. It can spit that information into Microsoft Word or OpenOffice in lots of different formats."
Just curious, what are your experiences with Zotero? Does it work for you as an alternative to EndNote?
( Mai 27 2008, 08:06:24 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [4]

Kommentare:

I tend to suggest the OO.o/Bibus/Gnumeric combination over OO.o/Zotero/Gnumeric to my students so far. We are doing biomedical research and Bibus does everything that is needed, including the rather usefull eTBlast search. Zotero is very usefull too and offers many features (by far more than Bibus). But I guess it is just about testing. EndNote is mainly used among my colleagues for a good reason. Though this software has a heavy price it can do everything that IS needed in academia (I mean writing peer-revvied papers). For example citation styles are handled perfectly from Endnote also all sources of scientific papers. Zotero is still somewhat behind in some respects, and Bibus allot. But the best part of Zotero is that it collects allmost every source of data. Thus while searching for information Zotero is great. However, I tend to say I depends largely on everybodies needs. Bibus and Zotero are for free (in all senses) therefore everybody can test them intensively.

Erwin, did you notice that citations get lost when an OO.o file (ODF) is saved as MS Word document (*.doc)? This is somewhat annoying if one has to deal with people who don't use a well designed product like OO.o/SA (sorry to admit, we don't live in an ideal world). I also tried the Sun ODF Plugin in MS Word but to no avail. Is there a workaround? Currently I use OO.o 2.4 and don't know if the issue still exists in 3.0.

Gesendet von Peter am Mai 27, 2008 at 10:30 PM CEST #

Hi Erwin,

Some OpenOffice.org and EndNotes users have reported to me that OpenOffice.org doesn't read the EndNotes fields in MS Office documents. As EndNotes is one of the most used bibliography software with MSO, it would be a necessary improvement for OOo to be able to import and export EndNotes fields.

Using Zotero needs this kind of feature in order to write document with other persons using MSO / EndNotes...

My two cents

Gesendet von Cedric Bosdonnat am Mai 28, 2008 at 05:58 PM CEST #

To support Cedric's statement, what I described with Bibus is basically the same issue.
For now OO.o has finally the basic charting capabilities as MS Office (though usually I use Gnumeric, R/RKWard and OO.o/Calc to accomplish my tasks) but missing is still the "fiel issue". Soon or later it will be fixed. I'm sure about this.

Gesendet von Peter am Mai 28, 2008 at 07:37 PM CEST #

Erwin, the best contact about this is Bruce D'Arcus (http://community.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb) and bibliography project at
http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/

I have never used EndNote much (just played with it for an hour or so, and it looked so confusing to me that I happily returned to my .bib database), coming from LaTeX+BibTeX background, but Zotero just blown me away. Its ability to collect data is just overwhelming. And on the top it exports to many useful format, collaborates with OOo, it's just great. Concerning the missing styles -- just by editing plain and simple XML file you can easily creat new ones (http://dev.zotero.org/creating_citation_styles).

I was trying to use Bibus before, but it never persuaded me to switch from LaTeX+BibTeX. Zotero would (except that I am now out of academia, so I don't need bibliographic management that much).

Gesendet von Matěj Cepl am Juni 03, 2008 at 10:56 AM CEST #