Web of Science and Zotero

I don’t want to turn this into ZoteroBlog, but since reference managers are major productivity software for me and Zotero is changing and improving very rapidly here is another installment. Some of my previous worries about Zotero not coping well with Web of Science have been fixed. The handy little import this reference or this collection of references buttons are back in the Firefox URL bar.

Also I now understand how to get references out of WoS and into Zotero by export/import. To do this mark the references you want. Then go to the marked reference list and tick the info to export (ie check the abstract button). Select BibTex from the menu at the bottom and Save. BibTex is imported very well by Zotero.

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.

Firefox 3 and Add-ons

I really love the new Firefox3 release. I’ve had beta version before but just updated and all my add-ons are also updated and are working nicely. The firefox Add-ons page can be found here. I previously managed to seriously confuse my bookmarks by upgrading and then downgrading to Firefox2. Don’t try this.

I have also now swapped to using del.icio.us the social bookmarking site. This has really nice integration with Firefox3, adding buttons to quickly bookmark a site. The best thing for me is that the left panel where bookmarks are typically listed in a browser can now toggle to display del.icio.us bookmarks complete with a searchable listing of tags. It is really slick. Very quick, well designed and much much more useful than tradiational bookmarks. I had got to the stage with Firefox2 where I was Google searching for sites that I knew were in my bookmarks because it would be faster to find them that way! The tag-based approach to data is so powerful I just groan when I see programmes not supporting tags.

Also in my add-ons is Zotero. This is an extension to help collect, manage and use bibliographic information. I’m an academic and spend a lot of time collecting journal articles. Zotero deserves a post by itself, soon I hope.

Lastly is Google Notebook. I don’t really use this as a notebook for manually typing information (I use Journler). But Google Notebook has a great web-clipping function. OK this is also found in other software too but Google’s implementation is pretty fool-proof.