Zotero integration

[Luhmann]

One of my favorite things about Mellel is how well it works with both Bookends and Sente. Although I am currently still using Sente, I've been watching the development of Zotero very closely. The ability of Zotero to pull information directly from the web, as you browse, and the new online sync capabilities being developed for version 1.5 are very attractive - not to mention the price tag. It would be great to see Mellel work as well with Zotero as it does with Bookends and Sente!

http://www.zotero.org/

There seems to be some discussion of this on the Zotero forums as well:

http://www.zotero.org/search/?cx=003601 ... mellel#581

[shmulik]

I second the suggestion. The new plug-in architecture that zotero has developed to make it work with word 2008 (without VBA, that is) should make this relatively easy for people who know about such things.

Redlers: what are you waiting for? Zotero is the future of citation management!

[rpcameron]

Personally, I still like to have an offline copy of all my data, including references. While I don't begrudge those who use online stores/repositories, more reference manager integration would be nice. In addition to Zotero, perhaps Papers and BibDesk integration might be in the future.

I'm not sure about how Zotero's plugin architecture works, but more integration/options are always nice. Perhaps this might be the precursor to AppleScript support within Mellel …

[shmulik]

@rpcameron: FYI--Zotero stores data on your computer (in the firefox profile).

[DanZac]

Zotero is the future of citation management!

Really? I've never like Zotero much. citation styles are not nearly as robust as BE and Sente, and Sente and BE can organize alot better, IMHO.

[shmulik]

My main reasons for saying that it is the future is that it is open-source and much more actively developed than other solutions. (I'll admit, I don't know what "robust" means) It also handles major styles MUCH better than either Sente or Bookends (and allows one to switch between them with greater ease, that is, turning footnotes into parenthetical citations...) But in any case--I'm not saying you should like it or use it, just that it is a major citation manager that Mellel should consider supporting, especially now that such support would be relatively easy to write.

[rpcameron]

I'm not sure I agree that solely because Zotero is open-source that it is the future. If that was the case, we wouldn't be having this argument, because BibDesk has been with us for a long time, and was always open-source.

Another hurdle to Zotero's domination is that it is a Firefox extension. I feel that reference management is important enough to warrant its own application, and not be relegated to a secondary task of a web browser. However, I know there are many others that use Zotero. So, perhaps some of the Zotero users could petition the developers to contact the Redlers to see what steps might be necessary for Zotero integration.

[shmulik]

To correct the leap you make: open source is probably something like a necessary condition for the futurity of data, but not sufficient. Perhaps, however, these are matters of opinion--as is the question of whether citation management is too important to be relegated to the browser and whether this is actually what Zotero does.

I make the appeal, however, in the opposite direction from the one you suggest: I think Redlers should contact Zotero about the implementation of a plugin. I don't see why it would be the other way around--I can't imagine Zotero would much time on a plugin for a wp that few people use, while Redlers paying customers stand to gain a great deal from such integration.

[DanZac]

My main reasons for saying that it is the future is that it is open-source and much more actively developed than other solutions. (I'll admit, I don't know what "robust" means) It also handles major styles MUCH better than either Sente or Bookends (and allows one to switch between them with greater ease, that is, turning footnotes into parenthetical citations...) But in any case--I'm not saying you should like it or use it, just that it is a major citation manager that Mellel should consider supporting, especially now that such support would be relatively easy to write.

How is it that Zotero handles the major styles much better? Sente and BE's formatting are highly customizable whereas it seems you're kind of stuck with the way Zotero does it.

But on to my real question— what do you mean by "turning footnotes into parenthetical citations"? Do you mean changing
(Doe 1998, 98)
to
John Doe, great book title (HarperCollins: 1998), 98.

Or do you mean Zotero can somehow change an in-text citation to a footnote in Word? If so, that's pretty cool- there aren't too many word processors that can do that.

If what you mean is the first part, all you have to do is a rescan with BE and Sente. Pretty simple.

I do support zotero integration btw, as well as Mendeley.

[shmulik]

Yes, I mean the latter: Zotero turns a footnote into an in-text citation. I have and did my diss with Bookends, and have tested Sente with every major update, so I know what they do-- the re-scan you mention. Not that it's a big deal, it would probably only take a few hours to cut and paste the references for say, a humanities book from the text into the footnotes but it's nice to automate it, if possible. Not sure if that would work in Mellel, but it does it in Word 08 w/o VBA, so maybe.

You actually CAN hack the CSL in Zotero and make your own stuff up. But in my field there are only two possibilities--CMS and MLA. The CMS styles that come with Zotero are complete--there is nothing to change, so I have no reason to fuss with it. And Zotero is the only citation manager of the three that can more or less properly do MLA style. Both Sente and Bookends have deal-breaker problems with MLA in-text citations that cannot be fixed at the user level (and I would ask: why would we need to customize citations--the point of a style is that it's a style--its rigidity is probably the main reason we use it.)

I don't like using Word, so lately I've been MLAing it with no plugin, making bib collections in Zotero for export as RTF. (Each project has a little collection ready for final export...) Probably wouldn't write in CMS footnotes without automation--what with your ibids and the the first and subsequent refs all mixing about--but in-text styles like MLA are doable for now. In any case, I'd love to hear a yes or no from Redlers about this...


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[DanZac]

What are the "MLA deal breakers" for Sente and Bookends? I've never used MLA so I'm not familiar with it

[shmulik]

MLA is a simple style: Derrida says "blah blah" (56).
Or: Many things have been said about blah blah (Derrida 56).

This name refers to an entry in the Works Cited page:

Derrida, Jacques. _Archive Fever_. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Bookends can handle this just fine: you simply cite {derrida 1995@56} in the first case and {-derrida 1995@56} in the second. Sente cannot do this, because it has no command to omit the author (rather, they have a "year only" command).

Obviously, this style has a problem with "disambiguation." If I cite two texts by Derrida, I need some way of distinguishing between them in-text. For this, we use the short title. Thus:

Derrida says "blah blah" (_Archive_ 56).
This is also about blah blah (Derrida, "Saying the Event" 234). [--This last one is an article.]
But then again, in _Archive Fever_ he says "blah" (322).

Sente can handle this disambiguation scheme, but has no omit author (nor an omit title function, but that's less important, I think). Zotero can handle it too, and it can allow you to omit the author (it also allows you to add texts to the works cited without citing them, by using fields, not simple cut and paste...) Bookends finally, cannot handle this disambiguation scheme for some reason and my attempts to explain the MLA users' needs to the developer--over the course of years, now--have tired me out. The latest attempt to make Bookends MLA-able has resulted in disambiguation using short titles always in inverted commas. So books go like this: Derrida says "blah blah" ("Archive" 56)--just like articles.

Anyway, Zotero is finally simpler, more user friendly out of the box, more humanities-oriented. Hopefully we'll see some action on the Mellel front.

[nicka]

So the only thing that Bookends can't do at present, from this rather baroque list of specifications -- is omit quotation marks around titles of books when they are used to disambiguate? Is that right?

I'm sure Jon at Sonny Software is up to fixing that.

The thing about changing footnotes to and from in-text citations is pretty impressive. For citation managers working with Mellel, at least, I think that would have to be handled at Mellel's end. Email to the redlers?

[DanZac]

I must agree, that is very impressive. Zotero must have some sort of script doing the job in Word for it, as that kind of function is a word processor feature, I think.

Both the BE and Sente developers I'm sure want to make their MLA citation style flawless. I'll email them both with this forum post.

And I would also love to see Mellel have this ability to flip between in text citation and footnote. That makes Zotero quite impressive in my mind. I know that Nota Bene on the PC also does that.

[shmulik]

@nicka
It seems to me that the style is the opposite of baroque. It is designed--I have the sense--for an age of typewriters so the writer didn't have to make a footnote. Unfortunately, this "simplicity" seems to be complicated to automate.

@DanZac
I think Bruce D'arcus, the creator of Citation Style Language (CSL) upon which Zotero is based, has in mind something like Nota Bene for the OpenOffice bibliographic project. I don't know what state it's in, but it sounds cool:

http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/

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