Zotero plus 1.5 years
February 13th, 2008 Stewart
I first posted about Zotero back in September 2006, and the jury is still out. The post still gets fresh comments, though, so I thought I’d mention a few things:
- Zotero has gone from having three citation styles to having 10 built-in, with another 40 or so available for download. This in comparison with over 2,600 styles available for EndNote. Zotero includes NLM style, but still lacks ICMJE and Vancouver, both of which are vital for anyone publishing in medicine or pharmacy.
- Zotero is not available for Internet Explorer, and there are no plans to make an IE version. Love it or hate it, IE still dominates the market with about 80 percent of the overall usage. A lot of these users are our faculty and students.
- Zotero lacks the web sharing capabilities of CiteULike, and I have yet to have a good experience trying to move Zotero-collected files to any other app, particularly EndNote.
Little has changed in the last year and a half. I can see the utility of something like Zotero. An open source alternative to EndNote and RefWorks would be a welcome addition to any researcher’s arsenal. As I’ve mentioned before, embedding a reference utility directly into the web browser is a very smart idea too. I wish this product could become the “killer app” of reference managers.
Unfortunately, most of our users will not use it because it doesn’t work with their browser of choice. If they did use it, they would find it difficult to collaborate with other users who aren’t also using Zotero. And in the end, they would find their options for publishing somewhat limited by the number of citation styles available. Zotero’s developers have their work cut out for them.
—————-
Listening to: The Call - I Still Believe (Great Design) (Live)
via FoxyTunes
Posted in citation managers, software, zotero | 8 Comments »