The era of "cloud reference managers"?

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nh220
Posts: 46
Joined: Sat Jul 21, 2018 5:53 pm

Re: The era of "cloud reference managers"?

Post by nh220 »

Jodi - I haven't tested this but I think that, in theory, if you use Zotero with the Zotfile add-on you can customize quite extensively the naming and location of Zotero attachments so that, coupled with Bookends flexibility, you can in theory have both programs point to the same PDF (in Zotero lingo this would be a linked file). However, I believe this would not work for Zotero and groups, which would be the main reason to use Zotero in a lab setting I imagine.

My solution is more basic and does not involve a ton of extra work. I use Bookends as my primary software solution and use it for solo-authored work. For collaborative projects, teaching, and when I have to use a Windows PC, I use Zotero. I simply export the relevant citations from Bookends to Zotero. I do end up with duplicate PDFs on my hard drive, but that does not really bother me.

For journal articles, books, and such, this works really well with fairly minimal tweaks to the Zotero import. If you have a lot of custom reference types in Bookends, obviously this ends up a bit more challenging but still workable (for example, I have "Report" and "Statute" as custom reference types in Bookends, but the export process does not match them with the preexisting Zotero types so I have to manually correct them).

I suppose if you really want Zotero to "mirror" your Bookends library this would involve quite a bit of work, but if you are content with having Zotero play second fiddle, the above works fine. Alternatively, of course, you can use Zotero as the primary "data gathering" database and periodically export results to Bookends. You will have the same issue with duplicate PDFs (possible) and with reference types but, again, nothing too difficult to manage (especially if you mostly deal with journal articles).
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