Using Endnote bibliography styles in Zotero

I just downloaded and tried installing an Endnote style. It worked beautifully. Although how to do it seems obvious to me now, it didn’t 15 minutes ago, so here is what I did.

1. Go to Endnote styles page and download the styles you want.
2. Open Zotero and open the preferences pane, choose Styles from the icons at the top
3. Click the + button at the bottom right corner
4. A window appears allowing you to select and import the style from wherever you just saved it

It should then appear in your style list. I just did this for BMC Evolutionary Biology which you can see in the window screenshot given here. I haven’t yet investigated whether you can batch import files.

Zotero 1.5 Sync preview

Zotero 1.5 Sync preview is an update to the mostly excellent Zotero reference collection and management software. The big change here is that your references can now be synchronised across machines via the Zotero server. I haven’t experimented very much with it since the launch yesterday but after a quick look it seems excellent, a very helpful addition. Another big change that was mentioned is the ability to use more than 3000 Endnote bibliographic styles to format your citations. I couldn’t quite see how to implement this, but I only really played with Zotero1.5 for about 10 minutes last night so it might be in there. It requires Firefox3. Now if they could only get Microsoft to fix MS Word 2008 to accomodate bibliography tool bars again we would be there. I saw a blog recently (forgotten where) with someone saying that an institutional licence for RefWorks is around $10k. Zotero is free, and does all the same things, often much better, than RefWorks. It is also a community driven open-source project and needs supporting for that reason alone.

Zotero- have I upgraded too fast?

I might have spoken too soon about Zotero the bibliography tool. Although it looks great in Firefox3 when I actually came to use it today after a while of only thinking about writing stuff I discovered that I had broken it. I upgraded to Office 2008 (OS X) a couple of months ago and the Zotero toolbar only works with the previous version of Word. Also in the past when I have been using ISI Web of Science a beautiful little import button has appeared in the title bar when viewing records and just clicking it imported the reference in to Zotero. Now its gone. WoS has gone through a website update this year and maybe that killed it. So I exported all my references from WoS (in several formats) but couldn’t get them in to Zotero. I could see how to get references from other bibliographic tools but WoS no way. I’m sure this used to work for me. The excellent forums didn’t help me much on this occasion.

I have used Endnote since my PhD, but it has always been very buggy and unreliable on Macs (unlike PCs I believe). I got to a stage a few years ago where it was almost unusable, and I saw no signs of them updating the Mac version. I bought a copy of Bookends, which was great, but decided not to pay to upgrade to the new version 10 because I saw Zotero as the way to go. I still do, but wish it just moved a bit faster. I may have to spend the money on Bookends though as I can’t live without a working bibliography tool. Sad, I see so many really good aspects to Zotero, but maybe I’ll have to abandon it until the next major upgrade.