Zotero

“I'm a big user and advocate of Zotero, but "it just works" is not a description that I'd say applies to it.”

“it is owned by a non-profit who hasn’t made a single controversial update in 20 years”

“I have many issues with Zotero (which has been dumbing down at the expense of power users for some time) – but easy private sync is definitely not one of them.”

“I enjoy this setup because it allows me the convenience of saving files quickly using Zotero”

“Zotero's and Mendeley's own readers are good, and for straight reading they may be all you need.”

“a great way of quickly archiving web pages you've visited, including quick tagging and full text search”

“it gets slow as hell eventually because it is a whole-ass firefox instance”

“I needed to use a reference management system like zotero to keep track of it”

“Recommend supporting Zotero as a first class citizen for importing papers”

“The killer feature isn't organizing the citation information, it's allowing me to browse and read local copies of the actual articles.”

“Zotero has only like 50% hit rate with finding the correct bibtex, and those are not that high quality either.”

“the place where zotero and alike become useful is when you start to need a tree-like structure”

“ebooks mean you can search highlights, categorize them, see summaries of them”

“any document with > 100 references makes a very fast apple silicon computer slow as hell”

“you can drag and drop files and it generates a reference based on the metadata”

“Drag-and-drop of the PDF file worked for me in Zotero 9 (latest version).”

“Zotero seems to have removed this killer import feature in later versions”

“What's really cool is that you can use Zotero built in web APIs to get an external tool to manipulate your collection directly.”

“With proper bibliography management tools, everything (that has one) is centered around the DOI.”

“Tools like Zotero have certainly made it significantly easier to extract citations, but I still find issues with the extracted BibTeX details”

“it allows to put the PDFs also into the collection and has web based browsing included without custom software”

“Zotero will accept a doi/arxiv link (among other) and download the public metadata (authors, journal, abstract) for you”

“I run the Zotero iOS app and it's absolutely perfect for annotating papers and keeping my bibliography organized.”

“scan certain Obsidian folders for article drafts, add the cited literature to Zotero”

“even just the one click capture via browser is immensely worth it”

“Zotero was slow when my single collection started pushing over 1,000 papers”

“I just wish they made it as easy as a compose file to run this on prem.”

“The Zotero 6 to 7 upgrade completely broke this, and modified the database so that rollback is not possible.”

“it organizes my PDFs and lets me search them, instead of manually searching through directories”

“for a low yearly price one can have multi-device sync and support the project”

“the piece of software in my life that I have the least issues with ever”

“Love Zotero, have been using it since I started out as a researcher.”

“Zotero is open source and developed by an independent, nonprofit organization”

“Im unaware of another open source tool that provides all zotero does that's lighter weight.”

“why does it take 850 MB RAM to open right after installing fresh on windows”

“Its unbearably slow though, and it doesn't seem this will ever get better.”

“very powerful with all the management and annotation possibilities”

“can't imagine writing an academic paper without it or a similar tool”

“where I can highlight and save my annotations and sync my library between devices”

“It's obviously more focused on academic research but it takes snapshots and works as a more general purpose archive tool really well.”