I see Zotero fairly recently had a major update to v7. Zotero is a repository for articles, webpages, PDFs, and lots more. Some of the features I really like are:
Excellent layout and pulls in metadata really well from articles/ PDFs
Great sync between all devices
Very easy annotations, including highlighting of not just PDFs, but webpages, etc. These sync quickly across devices
Remembers where you were in the document when moving to different device
Can add documents or just link to them
Free for up to 300mb of storage (only $20/yr for 2GB)
I use it for all my academic projects. I find it simple (unlike Bookends which I found a usability nightmare). It’s just does what it’s meant to and it works well.
Also rely on Zotero in my academic writing. To be fair though, as a long-time Bookends user, I still find this software pretty impressive: even smoother experience on Mac, constant updates (notes flow and recent markdown export templates are top-notch), built-in editor of citation styles. What made me switch was not Bookends app itself, but infamous iCloud Drive – Bookends uses iCD to sync PDFs with iPad companion, and two times such sync just “clogged” (no tricks like killall bird helped, had to manually clean up Bookends folder and resync all attachments). After that I moved my library to Zotero, bought Zotero sync and live happier life since then
This is the only reason that had me curious about Bookends and I’ve forever been meaning to dig into my trial library. I’ve had some bruising experiences trying to manually edit Zotero’s output styles using their CSL editor, not understanding enough about the format to ever really got what I wanted. But eventually the community tends to provide the goods, like the new MHRA styleguide 4th version that is my bread and butter as a writer in the humanities.
I am a fully signup Zotero fan, and recommend it to all my colleagues and my PhD students. My institution offers Endnote, but for me its always been Zotero. It just works. I’ve moved away from its annotation or PDF features and attachments now, which I manage elsewhere. My database of 2000+ items is metadata only.
Thanks to @pdadoc for the heads-up on the new version, which I had missed and have just grabbed. Very nice indeed.
When I was at university (a couple of years ago) I used Zotero all day, every day. Fantastic application.
I still read a lot of articles, papers, blogs, websites, epubs for my day job. I’m wondering if I could still make use of it today to collate, index and annotate.
Just finished research for a paper, and I have to say the end result- integrating the references into the paper with a nice bibliography at the end, using the MS Word zotero plugin, was fantastic!
I’m an academic librarian and my library offers support for Zotero. It’s very popular with faculty and grad students. It’s a tougher sell with undergrads, but even they are impressed when they see the MS Word integration and how easy it is to output a reference list.
