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Comment by jabl | Hacker News Reader

I used to use Mendeley, but after the evil empire bought them out and added anti-features like preventing export of the DB (or something like that, I don't remember exactly what it was anymore), I switched to Zotero. I was on the verge of exiting academic research at the time, so I don't have as much experience of Zotero, but it seems very solid. Strongly recommended!

(Occasionally I wonder about how Zotero development is going. IIRC they were planning to switch from XUL to Electron many years ago, maybe that plan got shelved or they just don't have the manpower to do it..)

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Back in February someone in the forums wrote:

"Zotero won't be moving to Electron anytime soon.

We are planning to move to a more current version of the Firefox base later this year." https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/376000/#Comment...

I have been and still am a Zotero user. But I found it unfortunate that back in grad school many of my peers still used Mendeley. The school library even had workshops/classes in which they taught how to use the software. I found it ironic that despite paying loads of money to Elsevier for the journal subscriptions, they were advertising their software too!

In all likelihood, Elsevier were subsidising or oturight funding those classes.

TANSTAFL. Especially in consumer technology "training", which is really sales-pipeline-building, and hooking addicts for life.

You might find FOIAing the library or univesity interesting, for contractual relationships.

> added anti-features like preventing export of the DB (or something like that, I don't remember exactly what it was anymore)

The application's internal SQLite database was encrypted. The user-facing export functionality is still there, as are the public APIs used to interact with the data stored online. One of the engineers involved is a friend of mine. From what I understand the change to the internal DB was an over-zealous response to GDPR concerns.

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