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A comment on Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover. Parent comment

Re:Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover by kanzure on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @02:52PM (#5527217) 

    > I think Mendeley had more advantages over Zotero than the social aspect
    > (which I never used). Mendeley could automatically incorporate your
    > folder of orphan PDFs into your library
So can Zotero.

http://www.zotero.org/support/retrieve_pdf_metadata

    > automatically fetching the bibliographic info.
https://github.com/zotero/translators

https://github.com/zotero/translation-server

(Those two repositories are the greatest things about Zotero, in my opinion. Holy crap.)

    > It had a nice dedicated desktop client for searching your library
Zotero standalone seems to be listed here very prominently:

http://www.zotero.org/download/

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Re:Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover by jessriedel on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @05:01PM (#5528142)
Thanks for the correction. I never downloaded it because it was described everywhere on the web as a browser extension. The existence of the standalone client is not mentioned on the homepage, where in fact it says "It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself."

Is the standalone client decent? Is the meta-data retrieval as good as Mendeley?

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Re:Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover by kanzure on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @05:13PM (#5528223)
> Is the standalone client decent? Is the meta-data retrieval as good as Mendeley?

I think the standalone client is actually based on Gecko SDK and possibly xulrunner, so calling it standalone might be a little unfair of me. However, it certainly doesn't require Firefox itself...

Zotero retrieves metadata directly from a publisher's site with 100s of javascript plugins. Mendeley told me once that they just do OCR with some super-proprietary system they licensed. But I suspect that Mendeley now uses their servers to centralize millions of pdfs and their metadata, and probably uses that to identify and fingerprint the files in your collection... maybe.

Here's to hoping that Elsevier wont revoke your pdfs!

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