KD – If you’d like an all-in-one solution, you should try Mendeley. It will automatically import and extract info from PDFs as well as store articles you bookmark from the browser. No mucking about with .ris files, which I’ve certainly done my share of.

I’m now working for Mendeley, so if you’ve got any questions about upcoming plans, comments about needed features, or just complaints in general, I can make sure the responsible people see them.

Well, thanks for letting me intrude. You should do your own comparison sometime, I’d love to see it!

One thing that zotero does which endnote doesn’t do, and means that I really can’t use endnote is it doesn’t store when I added a reference into my database. I rely on this to remind me of what I was doing at the time.

If you need to import from an endnote file with embedded links to files in it, try to make sure you only have absolute links to the file, not relative ones because when you make the files relative, the links get stored as some ridiculous propietary url scheme that is hard to translate back to the correct format that zotero requires for import of links from RIS [ correct because it's based on an open source standard, not on a scheme that Thompson pulled out of their hat, then added spurious newlines to ] I’ll be writing a script to fix links in endnote generated RIS some time soonish – from a programming point of view it looks easy enough once the stupider bits of the proprietary format are dealt with.

Anyhow, I think that once I showed the boss the ease with which zotero can link one reference to another, store notes and generally organise things in a coherent way, we’ll all be using zotero before too long.

I am, however, interested in kd’s attempts to link Zotero & EndNote. I use both – we have EndNote round the campus, but I don’t have it off campus – so tend to use Zotero (running in a portable version of Firefox, as I use a number of different computers) as a temporary store. Sometimes, though, it works better than others, and I’m never quite sure what I do differently!
(The only drawback to that is that I generally start browsing from a PC based browser, & then want to save something so have to switch to the portable version.

I would also recommend people try Sente (also Mac only). That was a close second choice for me.

Well, Bookends has a built-in browser for when it is necessary, as well as a means for searching directly in one’s university library catalogue. To each our their own, but I prefer not to be tied to/tied in-to Firefox whenever I want to work with my reference manager. But, I’m a distractible fellow, and an open browser is an endless temptation to the great internet mind and time suck for me. It simply works better for me to separate my research activities from my web browser.

parezcodygigo: I’ve found that for functions that are closely coupled to the web (as reference management is), a web browser is the ideal place to have your tools.

My problem right now is I’ve been using zotero heavily for a couple of years now (even built some text mining tools on top of it), but my new research group are big on endnote, which is going to have me testing the zotero -> endnote interoperability to the limits.

I used Zotero for a while, but I didn’t like having to use Firefox, or having to have a browser open to use it. It is very good, though, at grabbing citations off the web. That functionality is definitely 4-star. Being tied to the browser, however, was not 4-star for me.