Research Library on the Cloud

· 2 mins Read
Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

During writing my bachelor thesis, I found it extremely difficult to keep track of all those references. You add a couple of lines in the middle of your thesis, then add another citation, and all reference numbering will change. I was working part-time in a research institute and my supervisor, a Ph.D student at that time, introduce me to the Endnote. Wow, so there was a solution to that problem.

Endnote is expensive. I do not have good memories of Mendeley. It was not quite stable when I was using it for my Masters’ thesis and left me with lots of broken links. So, when I was starting Ph.D, I looked for a solution and found Zotero. Zotero is a free reference management software with great extensions for Microsoft Words and Chrome. You can find a comparison between Mendeley and Zotero here and another one here.

Zotero is a great tool. You can organize your citation library using collections and tags, with some wonderful colour-coding. It has an active community and is free if you use less than 300 MB of online storage and you generally should not need that if you are working on a single system or do not have a big library. Zotero syncs the metadata on the cloud, but you cannot access the PDF files or other attachments on another device or in your online library on Zotero.

I was working on three different systems and sometimes the lag in Remote Desktop Connection is intolerable. Also, I have a huge library and it was time to look for a way to sync files across multiple devices. After googling my problem, I found a comprehensive guide by Stephen Chignell which integrates Zotero with any cloud service. In my case, Google Drive takes care of syncing the files. Zotero also has a support page on how to use Alternate Syncing Solutions

I also found that Zotero has many Zotero and third-party plugins and many of them are really cool and helpful, here I will drop a few of them:

  • Google Scholar Citations for Zotero retrieves the citation counts from Google Scholar and adds them to the item in your Zotero library
  • Zotfile, a plugin necessary for cloud integration and also automatically renames, moves, and attaches PDFs to Zotero items using pre-defined rules. Zotfile also has a feature to send the PDF files (attachments) to another folder, which you can then read on your tablet.
  • ZotNet creates a network map of Zotero items using the “Related” feature. If you are using the “Related” feature to organize your items, it gives you a great insight for literature review.
  • VS Code Citation Picker for Zotero brings up something similar to the word processor citation picker in VS Code. If you are using TeX, this is one of the best options.
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