I tried out Sciwheel for this assignment. I have used Zotero for about 5 years, both as a student and in a limited way in professional settings, and recently I’ve heard a couple colleagues recommend Sciwheel over Zotero, so my interest had already been piqued. After creating an account and adding the browser extension, Sciwheel was immediately easy and intuitive for me to use. I was able to import citations from Zotero projects and downloaded PDFs, and also import citations and PDFs from the UNC Library’s webpage. Sciwheel was not able to pull adequate metadata for several of the references that I imported as PDFs, but this was expected and I appreciated that those were flagged and filed as “incomplete”. I had a much harder time using the chrome extension, and it took me several attempts with different articles before I was able to successfully save a citation from the library’s catalog instead of just a link. This is not a difficulty I’ve had before with Zotero, so it made me wary since saving citations from library catalogs is one of the most important functions of a citation manager for me. Sciwheel seemed to particularly have trouble with saving citations for ebooks from the ebook’s webpage.
I also had a few reservations about using Sciwheel to create bibliographies. I was able to create one fairly easily, but it downloaded as an html file that honestly doesn’t seem that useful to me since it’s unformatted. I was also fairly overwhelmed when choosing a citation style, as I entered APA and there were 29 different APA options. I genuinely don’t know which one I would want to use if I were creating a real bibliography for a paper. One of my favorite things to do in Zotero is to simply drag a reference from the desktop app to a Word doc and have it appear fully formatted (because the citation style is set in preferences), and I could not find a way to do that with Sciwheel, at least in the web app. That was disappointing and a major drawback for me. I’m sure I could find a way to get fully formatted citations more easily, but it wasn’t on the first, second or third try.
I was more impressed by the capabilities of saving full text items in Sciwheel, along with the ability to highlight and annotate. I don’t know if I can overstate how useful it seems to me to be able to search annotations on PDFs in Sciwheel, that functionality alone has me considering making the switch from Zotero. I also like that it has both a web app and a desktop app, since I prefer to use a desktop app when creating bibliographies but I appreciate being able to access the citations from any computer. I found it very easy to organize and manage my citations within projects and I like the automatic division between personal projects and shared projects. There is an immediate structure and organizing logic to Sciwheel that fits well with the way that I work with citations managers. I do not often use tags, but I have found them helpful a few times and I appreciate the capability.
Another aspect I did not have the chance to fully test but am very excited about is the ability to share not only citation libraries, but also to work collaboratively on manuscripts via the Google Doc add-on. I guess I would be curious how much value is added by using Sciwheel instead of just Google Docs, but it sounds exciting to me and I would absolutely try it out. In the past I have really appreciated shared article or citation collections, and I see that it is fairly simple to share a project with someone else on Sciwheel. One drawback is that I registered for a free account, so I am limited to three shared projects. With both Zotero and Sciwheel, institutional membership is great to have but I also worry about losing access to all of my work. I think I would especially worry about that if I were to use all of Sciwheel’s features, so that instead of just collections of references I could potentially lose manuscripts, article annotations, and collaborative documents. I am definitely wary of storing so much of my research work on a platform I may not have access to long term, or that may stop being maintained as a service. Even though some of those features are very tempting, I would have to really weigh the advantages of streamlining the research and writing process against that very big potential disadvantage.
I, Sara Kittleson, have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment.