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I want to love Zotero, I really do. But the last time I tried it seriously, I found that: - metadata extraction/automated adding really doesn't work right with

I want to love Zotero, I really do. But the last time I tried it seriously, I found that: - metadata extraction/automated adding really doesn't work right with my research workflow (a lot of google scholar searches, a lot of humanities and social science sources)---lots of inaccurate or incomplete info, lots of downloading RIS files and then manually importing and separately manually importing the PDF. - documentation for things that would be useful like hooking up to academic library proxies is nonexistent. Take a look at the chain of empty links when you try to get proxy info: https://www.zotero.org/support/proxies https://www.zotero.org/support/proxies - no better bibtex for zotero 5... Although maybe this has changed recently? Which would be amazing.

dstillman 8y ago
> metadata extraction/automated adding really doesn't work right with my research workflow I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but the primary way of adding items to Zotero is with the Zotero Connector browser extension, which lets you save high-quality metadata and PDFs with a single click from a huge variety of sources (certainly including humanities sources, since Zotero was created by historians). No other tool comes close to Zotero's abilities here. Metadata quality does vary by site, though — Google Scholar specifically only provides limited metadata, so you'll often get better results by clicking through to the linked article and saving from there. We have plans for functionality to flesh out incomplete metadata retrieved from subpar sources. Zotero can also automatically retrieve metadata from PDFs you drag in, which should work for the vast majority of recent PDFs and many older ones with DOIs assigned, though that's not meant to be the primary workflow. > documentation for things that would be useful like hooking up to academic library proxies is nonexistent Current proxy documentation is here [1], and that's what's linked from the main documentation page. I've fixed the outdated page you pointed to — thanks. Note, though, that the proxy functionality is meant to work automatically for the popular academic proxies, so most people don't need to configure anything to use it. (And as far as I know other competing tools don't offer anything like this.) > no better bibtex for zotero 5 BBT has worked with Zotero 5 since last year. Disclosure: Zotero developer [1] https://www.zotero.org/support/connector_preferences#proxies_preferences https://www.zotero.org/support/connector_preferences#proxies...
- paultopia 8y ago
  Thank you---this is super encouraging, and a good signal to maybe go back to it. Incidentally, one thing that would be really helpful for a documentation standpoint would be a series of articles about best practices, like which metadata sources work best.

dstillman 8y ago

> metadata extraction/automated adding really doesn't work right with my research workflow I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but the primary way of adding items to Zotero is with the Zotero Connector browser extension, which lets you save high-quality metadata and PDFs with a single click from a huge variety of sources (certainly including humanities sources, since Zotero was created by historians). No other tool comes close to Zotero's abilities here. Metadata quality does vary by site, though — Google Scholar specifically only provides limited metadata, so you'll often get better results by clicking through to the linked article and saving from there. We have plans for functionality to flesh out incomplete metadata retrieved from subpar sources. Zotero can also automatically retrieve metadata from PDFs you drag in, which should work for the vast majority of recent PDFs and many older ones with DOIs assigned, though that's not meant to be the primary workflow. > documentation for things that would be useful like hooking up to academic library proxies is nonexistent Current proxy documentation is here [1], and that's what's linked from the main documentation page. I've fixed the outdated page you pointed to — thanks. Note, though, that the proxy functionality is meant to work automatically for the popular academic proxies, so most people don't need to configure anything to use it. (And as far as I know other competing tools don't offer anything like this.) > no better bibtex for zotero 5 BBT has worked with Zotero 5 since last year. Disclosure: Zotero developer [1] https://www.zotero.org/support/connector_preferences#proxies_preferences https://www.zotero.org/support/connector_preferences#proxies...

paultopia 8y ago
Thank you---this is super encouraging, and a good signal to maybe go back to it. Incidentally, one thing that would be really helpful for a documentation standpoint would be a series of articles about best practices, like which metadata sources work best.