Configuring external storage of Zotero

In a previous post I talked about Zotero as an alternative of Mendeley. This today's post is about configuring Zotero to store your articles on Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. in order to extend the limitation of 300MB and extend it to 5Gb or more (depending on the cloud that you are using).

In my case, I use OneDrive to store this kind of data because it's a cloud that I barely use, and you can even use WebDAV protocol to synchronize your libraries between different computers using OneDrive. But today I will not talk about using OneDrive as WebDAV.

Well, in order to use OneDrive (or whatever cloud) as an external storage, the first thing you need is to have the client of that software installed. When you have your cloud client installed, you can create a folder inside your cloud, mine is Research Papers, this folder will be used to store all linked papers of Zotero.

The second thing you need to do is to go to Zotero Preferences -> Advanced Tab -> Files and Folders; here you need to change Base Path on Linked Attachment Base Directory to your path to OneDrive.

Doing this, you'll say to your Zotero installation that it needs to use relative paths instead of absolute paths, so, when one reference is added in one of your computers, the link to the document won't be broken when it will be added into the other computers.

The third thing you need to do is to go to Tools -> ZotFile Preferences and change Location of Files to Custom Location.

Doing this, all your attached documents will be stored on your cloud. I also strongly recommend to check Use subfolder defined by. Your documents will be stored in a more logical way.

Finally, in Zotero -> Preferences -> Synchronize you must add your account here, but Files Synchronization must be left unchecked because synchronization will be in charge of your cloud provider.

Zotero: An alternative to Mendeley

Last year I started a Doctorate Programme, one of my daily tools is Mendeley, an extremely useful tool to manage my library and create references to the articles that I read. But this tool has a handicap, it's not open source. So, I've started a search in order to find a new tool able to do exactly the same that I'm doing with Mendeley, but being open source; after a quick search on Google, I've found Zotero: a tool that has the same behavior as Mendeley, but open source; and it runs on MS Windows, Mac OS and GNU/Linux!

To install Zotero (on a Mac), you can use it brew, with the following command:

brew cask install zotero

After Zotero is installed, we can run it for the first time, it will ask to install Firefox add-on, as well as Microsoft Word or/and Libreoffice add-ons, we accept it and the initial setup of Zotero is done. t's more than reasonable to register to Zotero, because then you'll be able to synchronize your research database between your computers. Storing references is free and unlimited, but storing PDFs is limited to 300MB in the free plan.

But, if we want a more enjoyable experience, we should install Zotfile and Zutilo plugins. These two plugins extend the functionality of Zotero in a magical way.

Zotfile is great because it stores the documents using a folder structure of YY/MM (year/month); instead of the random generated name folder that creates Zotero itself. The second great thing is that you can store the attached documents outside Zotero Folder, so it opens the possibility of using a Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. in order to save your documents and to avoid the restriction of 300MB of cloud using the free plan.

Zutilo is the useful component because it adds these functionalities (to cite some of them) to Zotero:

• Copy, paste, and remove sets of tags
• Select and right-click to relate several items
• Copy items to the clipboard in several formats
• Keyboard shortcuts for editing items and focusing and hiding different elements of the Zotero user interface
• Right-click to save link or document as an attachment to currently selected item (only for Zotero as a Firefox addon)

It's time to take action, it's time to protect your internet

On July 5, 2018, the plenary session of the European Parliament voted on the reform of copyright in the digital internal market. These two articles (11th and 13th), as proposed, would have paved the way for comprehensive censorship of the Internet. For this reason we have created a fortunately very successful petition, which, thanks to the personal invitation of MEP Julia Reda, we were able to present to MEPs immediately before the vote, together with the at that time 736,000 signatures. The untiring efforts of our Members and the enormous number of signatures enabled us to make Members aware of the considerable risk of this reform and thus prevent it from being adopted in plenary.

The reform proposal on copyright (especially Articles 11 and 13) was rejected by 318 (53%) to 278 (47%)!

However, the threat has not yet completely disappeared! The rejection in plenary simply means that the reform proposal will have to be revised and resubmitted. We expect another vote on a revised version in September

Now, it's time to take action and protect your internet as you know. It's time to contact your MEP!

Installing LaTeX on MacOS - A brief guide into LaTeX (Part I)

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as free software.

If you want to create and edit documents in Mac, you'll need to install and editor and a compiler; I'm currently using TeXworks, it's not the most fancy editor, but gets the job done. You can install it just using brew, with the following order:

brew cask install texworks

You will also need a compiler, this is the software that does all the work under the hood and is needed for TeXworks in order to compile documents. I use MacTeX, and this software is directly dectected by TeXworks, so you'll no need further configuration. You can install it in the same way:

brew cask install mactex-no-gui

Bibliography on LaTeX - A brief guide into LaTeX (Part II)

This post (and the related ones) is more intended to help me when I'm using LaTeX than anything else, the references here couldn't be accurated or the best solution when you're writing in LaTeX because I'm a newbie in this system.

My working environment:
- Operating System: MS Windows 7 Professional 64 bits
- LaTeX Environment: TexWorks
- LaTeX Compiler: pdfLaTeX

The procedure to create a bibliography is as follows:

Create a file with .bib extension. For example references.bib. This file will contain all references that you are using in your article, book, etc. and save it in the same level where you have your .tex document.

To generate the documentation you must issue the following:
- Compile .tex file with pdfLaTeX
- Compile .tex file with BibTeX
- Compile .tex file with pdfLaTeX
- Compile .tex file with pdfLaTeX

It's not a mistake compiling two times after BibTeX, because the first time is for generating the references on the document, and the second time is for putting the number of reference where the documents are cited.

In your .tex document, the syntax is the following \cite{label} where label is the first parameter inside the reference.