Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture and faith from the Antipodes.

Postgraduate, Teaching/Education

More on bibliography software

Tim’s recent post SansBlogue: Referencing for the financially challenged generated a few comments, so he’s followed it up with SansBlogue: Zotero is brilliant, and integrates nicely which includes some movies of how Zotero works in practice.

I have Zotero installed on the old iBook and it’s integration with MS Word v.X for Mac is quite painless and seems to work well. Certainly I think it’d be useful for working on shorter documents (essays, articles and chapters) providing you were using a common citation style.

Of interest particularly to biblical scholars is Zotero Forums – Using Zotero with the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) style. SBL with EndNote is supported (see here), though it is only for versions later than EndNote 9, I think.

See also:

2 Comments

  1. Scot Becker

    Zotero is also a very adept PDF manager, with full text search, tagging, and the ability to ‘categorize’ PDFs/references in unlimited folders (according to workflow, library location, project, or whatever). It slurps full-text articles from many sites (only those you otherwise have access to of course) automatically, with bibliographic info.

    It needs a few bits for full SBL style support, but it’s on the move. It has already surpassed Endnote in may ways, and might soon leave it entirely in the dust.

  2. Yes, I saw Zotero has some PDF handling software in the preferences screen. Haven’t had much chance to play with that feature yet though – given the huge number of PDF files on my disk though that would be a good feature.

    Of course, that sort of indexing/search capacity is only as good as the type of PDF being analyzed. Some journals still seem to produce a PDF of scanned pages of a journal – each page is an image – which would mean that there would be an additional OCR step needed, perhaps.

    As I’m in flux as I start my new academic appointment over what platform I’ll be working on for writing etc. maybe the portability of Zotero across software platforms is the way to go. Maybe I’ll give Mellel and Bookends or Sente a go and see how they work. Always good to see what else is out there.