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)