I always got a kick out of introducing it to my friends in the humanities and blowing their minds. I have no idea how anyone writes papers without zotero or another similar tool. Keep up the good work.
What really blows my mind is how many of my academically inclined friends manage (and cloud sync) a big library of pirated papers using a rival piece of software owned by a major rights holder of said pirated papers. I mean... there's a good chance nothing will come of it, but it just seems like tempting fate. Zotero isn't just good enough, it's so good that the choice is completely trivial IMO!
Thanks, Zotero :)
With Zotero, syncing reliably across multiple devices was always hit or miss for me. Saving a few papers throughout my day, going home and reading/annotating them on my iPad, and then going back to work and pulling up a paper from the previous day with its annotations intact is the dream workflow for consuming academic lit that has always just worked with Papers but always required a lot of effort with Zotero. Maybe this is more of a "me" problem than a Zotero problem, but if I can't configure Zotero to sync reliably then many academics won't be able to.
There are some other neat features too. The built-in reader is good enough to not bother going with a third party. The handling of in-text references is better than any alternative (the actual reference is listed when hovering or clicking the reference number in text–a seemingly basic feature that lots of citation managers and PDF readers don't have that is essential for maintaining concentration). The handling of figures, metrics, and smart suggestion of related articles is also top-notch. I was sad to make the conversion from FOSS but haven't looked back yet. Hopefully this new Zotero release will make it possible to transition back–it looks like lots of killer features in Papers are offered by Zotero 6, which is great to see.
As for the rights-holding thing, most journals give their authors the right to distribute their work for free upon request, and there are some other loopholes for getting papers afaik, so I don't think it would be worth the time or effort to go after people with a few sci-hubbed papers in their Papers account. I am afraid that DRM will make this much harder though, especially for papers that have been downloaded on a university network for later offline reading.
Happy to see the Markdown note linking, Safari extension, and native iOS apps.
EDIT: no, it looks like Elsevier just owns Mendeley, which is what I was getting at. Uploading a bunch of papers to a company that's in a position to turn around and say "Those are some nice papers you uploaded to our servers, unfortunately they are evidence that you have fallen victim to piracy, now fork over $15k or we will be forced to proceed with a $15M lawsuit" just seems a bit reckless. Shrug.
I prefer Zotero, even though I would never even think of pirating a paper. Perish the thought!
Among other things, I love that I can subscribe to RSS feeds and then save individual items I want to be able to reference later on.
Before that I tried several things, local bookmarks, bookmark services (actually just delicious), and an org file for references, but Zotero is the most seamless system for knowledge repository for my use case.
I doubt it can (otherwise everybody would be using it as a personal knowledge management solution, I assume). I'll take a look anyways.
Is the "web plugin" something built into zotero, or an extra plugin to install? Calling it "plugin" makes it sound like something extra to install, but not finding it easily googling. Help me out?
All in all very handy.