Zotero vs EndNote: 2006 – 2011

Mewburn, Inger. 2011-03-17. “Zotero vs Endnote 4: the battle is on!” In this post PhD student, Gabriel Oguda, who is studying for an MPhil in Health Promotion at the University of Bergen in Norway, argued in favour of Zotero.

There was a conflict between firefox and therefore zotero on the PC (Vista?) setup I began using in 2007 and continue to use. With the crashes, clean-up and switch I was forced back to Internet Explorer and “lost” the zotero library I had been slowing building. Since then I haven’t taken the risk of switching back to Firefox and I miss many of its features.

My Endnote librairies remained intact as I had backed them up in multiple spaces both virtual and really real.

Since the crashes, clean-up and switch, I have been drawn back to Endnote as the safety deposit box of my webliographies and bibliographies.

I am not comfortable being so dependent on a product I cannot update (since I am no longer affiliated with the academic institutions that provided me with access and or licensed software)
But EndNote is reliable, robust and ready-to-use. It is really like FoxPro’s dynamic query searching (relational query by example?) capacity.

It lets me break the rules a little so I can use it to keep track of glossaries, timelines, biographies using their titles fields, etc in unconventional ways. It generates useful data such as my timelines in .html format. It lets me share my bibliographies seamlessly on my blogs.

It’s a bit like owning a very old Volvo (my licensed EndNote software dates from c. 2002-3? and will not support the http://www.myendnoteweb.com Alex so kindly recommended) that is ultra solid and dependable when I know I really cannot afford the repairs. Except that so much of my data is softwere dependent and there is always that concern that I might lose access to my own research as I did with FoxPro, ToolBook and Olympus. (Files no longer open because I am missing licensed upgrades). This was my motivation for experimenting with open source.

My original speechless page (2006-12-13) speechless >> web 2.0 >> Zotero vs EndNote has been attracting the most visits of all my posts lately so I have decided to update it as this post entitled “Zotero vs EndNote: 2006 – 2008”.

I would be really interested in Alex Liberzon’s experiences with http://www.myendnoteweb.com, http://www.CiteULike.org and LaTeX. See Zotero vs EndNote post (2007-01-23) has been finding out about . Says: January 23, 2007 at 7:52 pm e

Like Farrel Buchinsky (2007-02-17) I am looking forward to a seamless interface between Google docs, open source word processors and Zotero, Connotea or even Endnote (?) where citations and bibliographies will be automatically generated. My wish list/to-do-list continues to include a library database using Zotero that has compatibilities with free source like Google docs that worked like EndNote and the big name proprietorial software (BNPS) I became dependent on.

Since working with Google docs I have enjoyed the fact the my PC does not crash as it used to with the BNPS. But I still haven’t taken the time to learn how to integrate zotero with Google docs (or grant applications and manuscripts). Once I do I will post it. I use my own blog more as a How-did-I-do-that? not as a How-you-should-do-it?. There are better sites for the latter. I am a bricoleuse.

I would like to really use My EndNote Web as Alex Leberzon suggested but this service is only available for EndNote 10 licensed users. I’m EndNote 8. I have also started to investigate Cite-U-Like but I am discouraged by its academic criteria-based exclusivity. (I’m not even sure it accepts New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles? Concepts of authority (who can be a knower?) need to be re-examined in the era of Web 2.0+.) I still prefer deli.ci.ous. I have not been able to update my MySwickis and my Customized Google Search as much as I would like as these are invaluable resources for focused research.

Testing COinS Generator:

(Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. Organs without Bodies: on Deleuze and Consequences. New York/London. Routledge)

COins Generator