# Organize your journal articles with Zotero



## markbudde (Jan 4, 2008)

Not directly related to frogs, but...

I keep a lot of scientific references/papers around. Most I get off the internet, but some I photocopy from the library. Organizing them has always been a huge pain in the butt. I was recently writing up a paper and someone pointed me to a free program call Zotero, and I feel obligated to share. I've been so blown away by its usefulness.

It's essentially I reference manager, similar to Endnote. I have used endnote before, but always had problems with it, plus it is pretty expensive. Zotero is a plugin for firefox. When you find an interesting abstract/paper online, you just click an icon and it automatically imports the reference data. But the REAL value is that, if you have access to a digital copy of the article, zotero will copy it locally to your machine and allow you to search the text of the article in your database. It's really a great piece of free software, supported by grants to facilitate scientific progress. If you delve into it a little deeper, its also easy to setup your database on a free, third party remote server so that you can access your papers from anywhere.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

Hi Mark,

Is it only through one website or other sites? I may have to move over to fire fox.... 
Can you post or pm me the link? 
Ed


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## flapjax3000 (Jul 4, 2009)

Is this a user only program? If you recorded a journal to your server, could you allow it to be shared to a third party with Zotero? With all of the scientific knowledge of educated members on the forum, a neutral server could serve as a database of journals that is hobby related.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

flapjax3000 said:


> Is this a user only program? If you recorded a journal to your server, could you allow it to be shared to a third party with Zotero? With all of the scientific knowledge of educated members on the forum, a neutral server could serve as a database of journals that is hobby related.


Off topic but if you are on facebook a bunch of herp journals are available through https://www.facebook.com/pages/WikiH...629449?sk=wall 

Ed


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## Philsuma (Jul 18, 2006)

Ed said:


> Off topic but if you are on facebook a bunch of herp journals are available through https://www.facebook.com/pages/WikiH...629449?sk=wall
> 
> Ed


 
"page not found" ....


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

Try this one. https://www.facebook.com/pages/WikiHerps/124425087629449?sk=wall 

Ed


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## SDRiding (Jul 31, 2012)

Ok so this thread is really old, but I have been using Zotero and it's pretty handy. It can index PDF files, websites, wikipedia and can be linked/tagged/sorted. I'm really liking it. The stand alone will sync with chrome/ie with the appropriate plugins or it can work right from firefox. There is free cloud storage and the best part is you can setup a group to share information. Haven't test the group features yet so I don't know the limitations. Just thought I'd give it a friendly bump for any other info junkies out there.


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## frogparty (Dec 27, 2007)

I'm going to give it a try for all my patents and papers at work.


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## easternversant (Sep 4, 2012)

Mendeley is another good option, and is free.


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## SDRiding (Jul 31, 2012)

Hmm, I haven't tried Mendeley yet. Seems like you can actually sync them together so you could try them both simultaneously. I'm back in school again so I used Zotero for some papers and it was pretty handy.


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## frogparty (Dec 27, 2007)

I'm currently using Dropbox that is accessible to groups, and on my iPhone. Works well.


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## MonarchzMan (Oct 23, 2006)

SDRiding said:


> Hmm, I haven't tried Mendeley yet. Seems like you can actually sync them together so you could try them both simultaneously. I'm back in school again so I used Zotero for some papers and it was pretty handy.


I was using EndNote until my adviser suggested Mendeley. Now there's no going back. It is pretty awesome. I can organize articles, sync them to an online database so that I can access them anyway on any computer, and then what I find most useful is citing in Word. You hit "Insert citation" and it comes up with a search box. You can plug in the author's name and a list will show up? Not sure of the author? No problem, you can type anything in the title of the article and it will bring up a list. Not to mention that it has tons of journal citation formats.

Mendeley rocks


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