Used it for my Master's thesis in 2009 (with LaTeX via xelatex), for my wife's Master thesis in 2011 (idem), and now we use it to keep a catalogue of the books we own (just a small home library of about a thousand titles). For the latter Zotero is also great because of its integration with on-line library catalogues. You just type in the ISBN number in the magic box, and the book's metadata is there — in any language!¹ Mostly just a few tweaks to the data are necessary, but it works rather well.

1: Tested with English, Dutch, German, and Japanese novels.

Pairs well with a USB barcode scanner.

> The UI is somewhat dated but the functionality is great.

I like Zotero precisely because of its UI. It's efficient, and reminds me of the Firefox bookmarks manager.

In fact, I wish I could replace or merge Firefox's bookmark manager with Zotero, so I'd get the best of both worlds.

Zotero is/was a XUL application, and the whole application used to (also) be a Firefox plugin. So the similarities are not unexpected.

Is, for now. The parts of FF that Zotero relied on are being phased out (listed on the Mozilla docs site as "Archive of obsolete content"), so a transition to Electron is planned, and as part of that transition plan, parts are already being rewritten from XUL into React/HTML.

I was wondering how they implemented native UI with just javascript and nothing obvious in their package.json

I like the Firefox bookmarks manager a lot, especially the tags you can apply to a bookmark then search on.

If I get good enough with Lisp, I want to write an importer that takes all the tags from my bookmarks sqlite db, write them into org-mode files with each tagged bookmark listed in the relevant file.

Firefox's bookmark and history manager is atrocious x) Reminds me of IE5 or something like that.

I highly recommend the zotfile plugin! In itself, this plugin made zotero more interesting than the competition.

Zotfile + Better Bibtex is the ticket for me

I don't debate these make it better, but it doesn't seem like they should be required - most of the features are pretty standard!

Not auto-export for bibtex though

I think citationsy addresses a different public -- it looks to be more like ZoteroBib (zbib.org) or the web-client of Zotero than Zotero Desktop. Citationsy is going to be convenient for one-offs, but it's very common to shop around a paper until it is accepted somewhere, or submit a follow-up paper that builds on an earlier one, and each outlet may have different citation style requirements. Tools like Zotero (and Mendeley) make that fairly easy because you can just switch the style and re-render the document, and you're (ususally) done. With citationsy, as far as I can tell, you'd need to revisit every reference in the paper to adjust it to the new style. And while it seems to have fallen out of favor, I don't think citationsy can do ibid-style referencing.

I'm not sure I can buy into citationsy. From its website, there's too much contradictory marketing hype:

> We don’t have to promise to keep your data safe — because we don’t collect it in the first place... Citationsy lives in the cloud and is accessible from anywhere... Your data is saved in the cloud and backed up every 10 minutes

> Nothing to install, update, or patch... Use our iPhone and Android apps to cite books on the go with our barcode scanner and add the Chrome or Firefox extensions to cite websites in 2 clicks.

Perhaps I missed the use case where you retain your data, or there's a version you can self host?

The first sentence should read “personal data”, but you’re right, the copy is not great. To be fair though, you compiled bits of sentences from completely different sections to make it look more contradictory than it is.

To be clear, Citationsy has no tracking and collects as little personal data as possible.

When you cite something we keep your citation data on our servers, of course. You can download all your citation data at any time in various open formats (BibTeX, CSL-JSON, etc).

>To be fair though, you compiled bits of sentences from completely different sections to make it look more contradictory than it is.

I think consistency across different sections is a reasonable expectation.

Yes, but they’re about different things - one is about personal data and our privacy policy, and the other is about how there is nothing to install, update, or patch when using Citationsy, and all your references are kept safely in the cloud. Our privacy policy is very clear on what data we keep (in fact we link to it from one of the sentences OP omitted above - https://citationsy.com/privacy ). The sections are entirely consistent, unless you take a couple random sentences and disingenuously mush them together.

I use Zotero in combination with the Google Scholar browser plugin which let's you download citation files on most pages far more easily than those pages themselves allow you to. I can highly recommend this setup

I did the same but with JabRef, it's a great and simple piece of battle tested software. Highly recommend it.

Same here. I used it for my first Master's thesis(in biological sciences). I could not make Mendeley work with Word. Zotero works great for writing thesis and research paper with Word.

It also plays well with Latex :) There's a BibTeX output style that works really well.