Talk:Zotero

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«History» looks like a ChangeLog, should be rewritten or removed

The «History» section looks wery much like a ChangeLog, nd should not be in the article in its current form. I propose to rewrite it to only have relevant information. Wikipedia is not the place for a ChangeLog. Solbu (talk) 13:27, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Corporation for Digital Scholarship

The website now says that Zotero is produced by the Corporation for Digital Scholarship. The website for that organisation says that they have been around since 2009.

On March 07, 2018, the website said "Zotero is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media". On April 11, 2018, the website said "Zotero is a project of the Corporation for Digital Scholarship and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media". At some point after that (and I can't be bothered going through the Wayback Machine to find an approximate date), it changes to just saying the Corporation.

I don't know why the Corporation for Digital Scholarship website doesn't mention the Center or the University, and I don't know the connection between the two organisations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 1.126.111.125 (talk) 02:37, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I added the change of ownership to the article. Thanks for noticing. Enozkan (talk) 04:04, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Citation network support

Dear User:Biogeographist, thank you very much for taking the time to revise the changes I made to the article earlier today. I'd appreciate it if you could consider these points:

I think the most important reason why this addition may be relevant is because Zotero would be the only reference management software to support this. That's why I included a reference to Goldenberg 2019, where it says "The existing reference management systems, such as Mendeley and Zotero, (...) do not provide means for tracking semantic relationship between the papers and, as a consequence, cannot address the second challenge [of multiplicity of papers]". I'm sorry this wasn't clear in my edit.
On the other hand, you changed "references metadata and citation graph visualization" to "automated local citation network metadata and visualization". Since both manual and automated references metadata are supported, and their are not limited to local references, would you agree changing this to "references metadata and automated local citation network visualization"?
Regarding Aaron Tay's blog article, I think he may be considered an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the field has been previously published by independent sources. Could we keep it as per the exception anticipated by WP:BLOG? I think it would be a better and more independent source than the workshop video.

In sum, if you agree, the sentence would read: "With the Cita plugin, first released in 2021,(Github, 2021) Zotero became the first popular reference management software known to support references metadata and automated local citation network visualization.(Goldenberg, 2019; Tay, 2021)". What do you think?

Thank you! --Diegodlh (talk) 17:13, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Diegodlh: I restored Tay's blog post; I guess we can count him as a subject expert. But I don't see the relevance of Goldenberg's article; it does not prove that Cita makes Zotero "the first popular reference management software known to support references metadata". And why is it so important to be "first" anyway? "First" just sounds like WP:PUFFERY from the software's creator. (No disrespect: You're doing awesome work on Cita, but your bias is showing.) Furthermore, there is ambiguity in the term "references metadata", because it could be interpreted by a naive reader to mean a bibliographic record, which is metadata (about a publication), or to mean that a bibliographic record can include data about other publications that it cites or that cite it, and there is nothing new about such data: it is easily added to any BibTeX record; BibDesk, for example, has had "Cites" and "Cited-by" fields by default for many years. The innovation of your software is automation of the process of adding and sharing such metadata and visualizing it, which is why I changed the phrase "references metadata and citation graph visualization" to "automated local citation network metadata and visualization". Perhaps the new phrase is still ambiguous and can be improved further, but something like "automated" is necessary, since manually added "references metadata" has been possible in reference management software for a long time (if not in Zotero). Biogeographist (talk) 18:35, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Biogeographist: Thanks again for taking the time to look into this!

Thanks for raising that BibDesk supports "citing" and "citedby" BibTeX fields. I was completely unaware of this and definitely refutes the argument that Zotero would be the first or only reference manager to support this. In fact, while looking for this, I found that JabRef, probably more popular than BibDesk, supports this too!

However, I still think it may be an argument for notability that it is a feature not widely supported by other reference managers, particularly by none of the other most popular (as per Ivey, 2018) ones, including RefWorks, EndNote, Mendeley and F1000. I still think this bit is supported by Goldenberg's article, when it says that existing reference management systems do not provide the means to track semantic relationships between papers. I understand I may be biased here again though, as the developer of one of the plugins that enables this.

Regarding ambiguity of the term "references metadata", I agree with you and have struggled with it before. However, I'm not sure the term "citation network metadata" is clear enough. What about "outbound citation metadata"? This is used in Nielsen 2007, for example. In fact, I just realized that we could refer to both inbound and outbound citation metadata support and mention the OpenCitations plugin too (I wouldn't mention the Scite plugin because it supports citation counts only).

Would you agree that I change the sentece again as follows? "Zotero supports inbound and outbound citation metadata, a feature not yet supported by other popular reference managers.(Goldenberg, 2019) This includes automated retrieval from and sharing to external sources, and local citation network visualization, through the Cita(Github; Youtube) and OpenCitations(Heibi, 2019) plugins. This further integrates..."

Thanks! --Diegodlh (talk) 12:57, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Diegodlh: Where one sets the threshold for the "most popular" reference managers is arbitrary. Even Ivey (2018) says: "Popular tools include RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, and F1000 Workspace." The word "include" indicates that it is not a complete list. Recent versions of BibDesk (v1.7.9, v1.8.3) have been downloaded over 45,000 times, indicating thousands of users, which is not "unpopular" for something as esoteric as reference management software for a minority operating system. There is no reason for Wikipedia to be the arbiter of what is "most popular" when such a claim is irrelevant to the functioning of the software. Again, like the word "first", "popular" sounds like WP:PUFFERY and should be omitted here.

Let's look again at Goldenberg (2018), which incorrectly claims that in "existing reference management systems", "there is no connection between the researcher's notes and his annotations in the papers' PDFs. More importantly, these systems do not provide means for tracking semantic relationships between the papers and, as a consequence, cannot address the second challenge." Again, BibDesk refutes both of these claims: the PDF reader Skim is developed by the same people as BibDesk and closely integrates with BibDesk; for example, here is a professor's series of blog posts from 2014 that shows how he connects between his notes, PDF annotations in Skim, and reference management in BibDesk, a blog post that was publicly available on the web four years before Goldenberg published his paper! And we have already shown how Goldenberg was wrong that no existing reference management systems "provide means for tracking semantic relationships between the papers". So I do not consider Goldenberg to be a reliable source on this issue.

Regarding the description of Cita's functionality, I still don't think "inbound and outbound citation metadata" is clear, but it's better than "references metadata". I think we are getting closer. What about this edit: "When using the Cita plugin, first released in 2021, Zotero supports automated retrieval and sharing of citation network data from and to external sources, and local citation network visualization." It would be helpful to have another sentence describing why this is important/useful: Can you suggest such a sentence with a source?

By the way, the whole "Features" section of this article is a mess and needs to be reorganized. I will consider working on that. Biogeographist (talk) 16:27, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Biogeographist: Thank you once more for helping with this revision. I think the sentence looks great! I will think of a properly sourced sentence that describes why supporting citation network metadata and visualization is important, and post it to the article in these days. Just let me know what you think about it! Cheers, --Diegodlh (talk) 12:24, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Biogeographist:@Diegodlh: I reorganized the structure of this section. For greater clarity, I would clearly distinguish between Zotero itself and optional extensions, plugins, forks etc. I hope this is ok for you. --Knodo (talk) 20:46, 2 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Knodo: Looks great to me. Thanks! --Diegodlh (talk) 12:05, 4 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]