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.