Zotero on Michael’s Domain

Installing Zotero on Linux/Ubuntu

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The official way to install Zotero on Linux is mildly speaking a nightmare ( https://www.zotero.org/support/installation ). The fact that you need detailed instructions and command line skills to succeed in the installation speaks for itself:

Zotero with 15GB free file storage?

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have been using Zotero as my bibliography management software since 2013 (migrating from EndNote) and have generally been happy with it (and I blogged about it before). Although our university provides EndNote access, most students will lose “free” access after leaving the university. A yearly subscription to EndNote used to set you back about €100 (in Finland via a reseller), which is an unnecessary expense in a student’s budget. EndNote’s “one-time purchase” model is, imho, deceptive marketing, because you are not eligible to major upgrades, which are released approximately yearly. The “upgrade fee” is usually about the same as the yearly subscription used to be.

University helpdesk recommends Zotero, but does not provide meaningful support

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

With the end of last year (31.12.2021), the University of Helsinki discontinued licensing its default bibliographic software tool RefWorks . Strangely, you cannot license RefWorks as an individual. That means when your academic affiliation ends, there is no way for you to continue using the software. Perhaps, the current owner of RefWorks (Clarivate) will kill it completely because RefWorks is a direct competitor of Endnote , which is the reference management solution that Clarivate is focussing on, given Endnote’s integration with Publons and the Web of Science (WoS), which is best known for its Impact Factor . Not coincidentally, Clavivate is owned by Thomson Reuters, which is the company that litigated against Zotero for offering its users the possibility to convert proprietary EndNote citation style sheets into the interoperable and standard CSL format . The recommended replacement for RefWorks is Zotero . I have no problem with this since I like Zotero and have been using it as my default bibliography management tool for now more than 10 years. On top of the fact that it is free, it combines two important features, which make it unique and superior to commercial solutions:

Where to move to from RefWorks?

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I never understood why our university pays for proprietary reference management software. Perhaps some old people in the administration still live in the 90s of the last millennium when EndNote was de-facto the only decent reference management software for WYSYWIG text processors. But those times are long gone. Finally, our university is at least dumping one of its proprietary reference managers:

Fiddling around with CSL

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

When writing manuscripts and grant applications, you always and again have to update the bibliography. This is what reference management systems are for. There are many of them (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software) . I have been using mostly EndNote, Bibus or Zotero ( http://www.zotero.org ), which I am using also at the moment. It has the advantages to be truly cross-platform, open-source and compatible with both LibreOffice and Microsoft Office. In the past, I have also been using for a short while Papers (by Mekentosj, who claimed they NEVER would do a Windows version), Bookends, Mendeley, and RefWorks (which is licenced by my university). None of them is perfect and even the most commercialized of them (Endnote, now owned by Thomson Reuters) destroyed one of my (MS Word) manuscripts totally when it crashed. Some of these programs store the formatting instructions for inline citations and the bibliography in the so-called CSL (Citation Style Language, an XML-type language, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_Style_Language).However , I could not find an easy editor for CSL: the in-built one from Zotero is not great, neither is the online CSL editor ( http://editor.citationstyles.org/visualEditor).However , I needed a way to quickly export my own published papers to create a “List of Publications” for grant applications. Hence I created a group in Zotero and added all my own publications into this group. I now mark them all, right click and select “Create Bibliography from items”. In the pop-up dialog, I choose the style and mark the radio-buttons “Bibliography” and “Copy to Clipboard”). Back in my word processor I just have to paste the clipboard and I most of the work is done. However, I could not find any good style for this, so I created one myself (which is based on Vancouver). Feel free to use it…