- Zotero Plugin
- Evernote And Zotero
- Zotero Link In Evernote
- Zotero App Download
- Zotero Note
- Endnote Vs Zotero Vs Mendeley
Evernote and Zotero are two useful tools for library clients (and your own use), each with a slightly different function: Evernote is a cloud based tool for note taking, organising and archiving information (including photos and sound recordings) which allows the user to create tags and to arrange information into notebooks. Evernote is a suite of software and services designed for note-taking and archiving. A 'note' can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, file attachment, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten 'ink' note. Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research. Available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. New: Just need to create a quick bibliography? Import/Export Formats supported by Zotero. Contribute to aurimasv/zotero-import-export-formats development by creating an account on GitHub. I explained that I use Zotero with Scrivener. Let me share that process with you. My process for writing books has evolved over time. It now uses five tools: Diigo, Evernote, Zotero, Scrivener, and Google Docs. I am going to focus on what I do between Zotero and Scrivener. Let’s start with Zotero.
An elephant posing like the Evernote logo. [image source]
I’ve been using the note-collection application Evernote for several months now and thought I’d share some of the reasons why it works well for my researching needs as I’ve been working on my dissertation in American studies.What Is It?
Evernote is a note-taking and clipping application that lets you save all kinds of things to various project-oriented “notebooks.” Their motto is “Remember Everything,” and they certainly do help you with that. It has a desktop application, browser plugins, and mobile device apps galore that you can sync to your account so that all of your clippings, notes and notebooks are the same on whatever device you access them from.
Evernote really does make it easy to collect images, links, bits of text, emails, just about anything you can think of — they even have just released a notebook (an actual notebook not a digital one) with a grid pattern that makes it easy to capture handwritten notes by taking pictures of the page with your smartphone. Even objects of the material world are not safe from your collecting!
My Evernote window as it looked this morning as I did some writing.
How Does It Work?
Evernote is organized into “notebooks” which are collections of notes of stuff you want to keep track of. When you come across something that you want to save, you can collect it using a wide variety of methods: you can copy and paste it into a new note, clip the portion of a webpage that you want with the browser add-on (the Web Clipper), drag and drop PDFs and images into a new note, create a new note from selected text — the list goes on.
Part of the appeal of Evernote for me is that it is designed for collecting notes on things from many different sources, and Evernote’s designers made it easy enough that you can collect notes in a few seconds.
After you’ve collected something, you can create tags to help you sort your notes later, you can add comments or your own notes, and you can edit the notes themselves. One of the things that I like to do is when I download a PDF of a document for my research, I create a note from the page I downloaded it from, then drag and drop the PDF into the note later, so that the full text of the document is there, along with a link to the page that I got it from, and other relevant contextual information.
Five Reasons Why I Use It
Here’s the web clipper in use with Google’s Chrome browser. When you clip something it lets you add tags and comments right away before you save it to your Evernote notebook.
![Evernote Evernote](https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/informativeflights/files/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-15-at-5.07.16-pm-24trt0r.png)
A few of the perks of using Evernote:
- It has optical character recognition capabilities (OCR) — i.e. Evernote has the ability to convert images of letters/numbers into text that the computer can ‘see’ as text (like words from a photo, scanned document, or PDF). Some PDF documents already have searchable text, but many don’t. OCR is a must if you have a lot of text that you want to be able to search through. For example, I took a screen capture of the page of a document on a webpage, and after it went into Evernote, the text on that image was recognizable and I was able to search for (and copy and paste) text from it. This is also amazing for documents from digital archives — I can easily search all the text of the NASA documents I’ve been collecting for my dissertation, and that saves a huge amount of time.
- It lets you collect just about everything, including images with your smartphone — so if you have a smartphone with the Evernote app, you can even easily create notes based on stuff from the real-world. Speaking of screen captures, with one command you can clip a window or your entire screen to an Evernote note. It’s convenient if you really just want to quickly grab something without messing with the browser add-on. If you have a Mac, you can have an Evernote item in your menu bar, and making a new note at any time is as easy as pressing control-command-N. Accessibility to creating notes is everything for me with using a research manager, and Evernote does this really well.
- The Atlas feature lets you capture GPS information along with the notes you take. This isn’t something that I’ve used yet, but I think it would be really helpful if you used your smartphone to clip images to Evernote. (I think I’m one of the only people I know who doesn’t own a smartphone, but if I had one, I would use this feature.)
- The shortcuts for organizing your stuff is flexible and helpful. You can create your own list of shortcuts based on tags, notebooks, or individual notes. All you do is drag and drop them into the “shortcuts” list. I use tags to help sort all of my notes, so when I’m working on a particular section of my dissertation, I can drag and drop relevant tags into my shortcuts and switch back and forth easily.
- Sharing notes with others via email, Twitter, and Facebook is only ever a control-click away. Emailing notes works from within Evernote, and it sends the note as a PDF file to the recipient. Other sharing works via a shared link, so you can create a link like this one and send it to multiple people.
Evernote, like all the applications that I enjoy using, also has a vast and helpful support section, and lots of users on the Internet who can help you with problems you may have. Although so far with Evernote I haven’t had to use their support section, because the user interface has been quite intuitive — when in doubt, right-click (or control-click) on something!
If you’re interested in reading about organizing your research, you might find the following posts helpful: Organizing Your Research with DEVONthink Pro Office,Comparing Research Managers — Zotero, Evernote, and DEVONthink Pro Office, and Doing Academic Research with Zotero.
Related posts:
While working with Frank Bennett on implementing a Zotero workflow for google docs or Scrivener (almost ready – stay tuned) I wrote two little (tiny, really) tools that I thought I’d share.
Zotero Plugin
The first one allows you to quick copy the URI of an item from your Zotero client. The second one gives you a zotero://select link that opens an item in Zotero.
Evernote And Zotero
Zotero Item URI
Say you want to send a friend a link to an item in your public Zotero library or in a group on zotero.org. Right now this is a cumbersome process: Go online, search for the item, copy the link from the URL bar… With the “Item URI” Translator, you can simply drag and drop a link to the online version of the item. Setting this up takes three steps
- Download the file “Item URI.js” from here and place it in the directory “translators” in your Zotero data folder.
- Restart Firefox/Zotero
- In the Zotero Preferences go to the “Export” and set the Default Output Format to “Item URI” (this will be towards the bottom of the list)
Zotero Link In Evernote
You can now take advantage of Zotero’s quick copy functionality and drag&drop links from the item in your client right into an email or a blogpost. You can also use the shortcut for “Copy Selected Items – ctrl+alt+c on Linux/Windows, cmd+shift+c on Mac – to copy the URI to you clipboard. It will look something like this: http://zotero.org/users/76252/items/UUKSSZVK
Personally I think something like this should be included as a button in Zotero’s interface, but until that’s the case, I hope you find it useful.
Zotero App Download
![Zotero Evernote Zotero Evernote](/uploads/1/1/9/5/119551903/413483470.jpg)
Zotero Select
Zotero Note
Zotero allows you to directly link to an item in your local database. If you paste a valid URI starting with zotero://select into your URL bar in Firefox, it will open Zotero to that item. To create such a zotero://select link from an item, download the file “Zotero Select Item.js” from here and then follow steps 1-3 above. A link will look like zotero://select/items/0_USN95MJC and work only with your library.
Endnote Vs Zotero Vs Mendeley
The main use for such links would be to link to Zotero from other software, e.g. from note-taking applications There are several issues involved with that depending on your operating system and I’m not going to go into the details, but see here for a good overview with many more links and here for a Mac/Applescript specific solution. The version of the Zotero select translator linked to above will only create the link – you can find some more elaborate version – including html wrappers and basic item information – linked to from here.