Zotero
Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.
Summary
Our users have written 10 comments and reviews about Zotero, and it has gotten 328 likes
- Developed by Corporation for Digital Scholarship
- Open Source and Freemium product.
- Subscription
- Average rating of 4.3
- 60 alternatives listed
In addition to doing what it's supposed to do, it has super nice features: Clean interface, importing papers/pages directly from the browser (using Mozilla Connector extension), adding notes and attachments, exporting the full library in BibteX format, the amazing available plugins (like Zot_Bib_Web by David Reitter).
I started with EndNote, but it was feeling so old... Zotero is advanced (may be a bit overwhelming, when you try out also plugins) but will for sure get you there where you need with the reference management if you tweak a bit! With ZotFile you can also nicely sync Zotero with mobile devices.
It was great, until they decided to change the notes (from tinyMCE to ProseMirror). After losing most of the formating my notes I end up with the poorest editor I ever saw: you can't even use shortcut to add links, you can't edit and customized the source HTML codes of the notes anymore.
Easy to use and powerful. Its integration as web browser extension for saving metadata as items greatly enhances productivity. Can export to and import from many formats, as well generating citations with chosen style. It allows management trough multiple collections and subcollections. Has sync option for cloud and collaboration. Can be further enhanced through extensions built for it, such as Better BibTeX. Also allows tagging and annotation.
As of April 2021, the main issues for me are: it can't do bulk editing, and isn't able to automatically change date format.
Fastest solution I've used. Use the Chrome extension to collect citations and the Word/Google Docs add-in to add them to a document instantly. Then, automatically generate a bibliography
I moved to MacOS from Windows and while I'm enjoying using Pages, I've struggled with not having the References / Bibliography tools available in MS Word. Using the offline Zotero client has filled this gap perfectly and feels very intuitive. Without looking up much I've got folders for different projects and I'm using tags to separate what goes in to my bibliography and references. I can filter down to these very quickly and generate lists to put straight in to my Pages file. A bit more manual but it feels more flexible too.
[Edited by mlazzle, December 18]
To add, having a Firefox extension which allows me to quickly add in an online resource to a library is fantastic!
Great for archiving and indexing visited pages along with bibliographical data. Also allows for attachment of simple text notes and other auxiliary information. Supports web browser word processor integration, sync, rss, and more.