I have decided to look at Zotero since it is available to us. I am not particularly familiar with citation managers. Currently, I have been using Sciwheel to collect citation information for my master’s paper. I chose it mostly because a classmate recommended it to us in my proposal class and we have access to it through UNC. As far as I can tell Zotero and Sciwheel serve the same, if not similar, functions. Both have browser plug-ins, desktop apps, and integration with Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
I started using Zotero as I collected literature for the final project for this class. I also added a few of the articles I am using for my masters paper to see how it is different from sciwheel. I followed the recommends on Zotero lib guide via the Health Science Library. While it does have an online and desktop option if I want to save anything to the online version, I have to create a new private key “to share with a third party so they can access your data.” I’m not sure what that means but I’ll stick to importing articles using the desktop version for now. The online and desktop versions are also arranged slightly different. I think it would be useful to have both if you were doing research across multiple computers but that is not the case for myself. The desktop seems sufficient.
It is fairly easy to use the browser plug-in to collect articles. I have to have the desktop app open on my computer to import information, but it collects pretty much everything available: title, author(s), journal, volume, issue, abstract, DOI, URL, etc. There is other information capable of being pulled in, but I am not entirely sure what that information means. I think it may be for books, dissertations, or maybe white papers.
When articles are added to Zotero the PDF version of the article is downloaded as well as a link back to view the article online. If I go back to view the article online it does route to the DOI, which means I am locked out of using it unless I sign into the journal. Zotero does allow me to create a proxy so it takes me through my library account, but my computer security app does not recommend that. To access the journal again I just use UNC libraries. One of the more interesting aspects I find about Zotero is how it downloads the PDF automatically but there is not a space to annotate the PDF with Zotero. As far as I understand you have to download the PDF to your computer and save it like that to annotate it. If there is an easier way, it is not easy to find. I would have assumed that there would be some kind of way to do this in order to make quoting the articles easier using the Word plug-in. Adding in-text citations to quotes still requires manually adding the page.
It is easy to put articles into folders/collections in order to keep projects separate. It automatically adds a tag with the name of the folder if possible. I named one folder A5/FINAL and the / prevented the tag from being included. Putting articles into collections together makes it easier to generate bibliographies.
Zotero has access to a very large number of citation styles, but the default is Chicago. It took me a while to figure out how to change it to APA. I was honestly surprised how difficult that was given how most fields are particular about which citation style must be used. Once I had several articles, I tried generating a bibliography. Two of the articles didn’t generate with DOI, because they don’t seem to have one. I had to manually add the URL. Later found ability to include URL in preferences section.
At this point Sciwheel seems to the most useful option for my needs. While I do have upload the PDF separately to the Sciwheel website, I can annotate the document and use it to insert quotes into Word. I am not sure if I would need to upload the PDF if I used the desktop app but I have not taken the time to try to use it.