Zotero 8

[ashton314]

I have nothing bug praise for Zotero. Zotero is absolutely essential to my workflow as a researcher, second only to Emacs. Without Zotero, I would be spending inordinate amounts of time keeping all my papers + associated citation information organized. Zotero just takes care of it all. I love the iOS app—I read and markup papers on my iPad and everything gets synced smoothly.

I've been a paying member for a few years now. Part of it is for the storage (PDF packrat here) but mostly because I want to support development. Please consider supporting them if they help you in your work—they're worth it. https://www.zotero.org/storage

[tony_cannistra]

> Zotero is open source and developed by an independent, nonprofit organization that has no financial interest in your private information. With Zotero, you always stay in control of your own data.

Refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.

[ulnarkressty]

Right up until one tries to set up a self-hosted server (spoiler - you can't, at least not without 'significant effort' - they themselves say that if you ask about it).

[bayindirh]

Personally I use Zotero with my own WebDAV server for sync. Works as advertised, without a hitch.

[whimsicalism]

I highly recommend everyone to use Zotero. Their original marketing as being 'for academics' is entirely wrong and it is a first-in-class bookmark/knowledge manager.

There are many software recommendations that seem sort of hype-y: Obsidian, Notion, Keybase, etc. Zotero is not that and is a daily driver for me for years. It has also replaced Calibre for me although YMMV there.

[kens]

I second the recommendation for Zotero, especially if you find yourself buried under PDFs. Two things make it very useful for me. First, it organizes my PDFs and lets me search them, instead of manually searching through directories. Second, it has an OCR plugin, so I can OCR old PDFs and search the text.

[erredois]

Do you pay for their sync or self host? If self host, what do you use?

[kstrauser]

My kid was talking about all the papers they had to cite in their college class. I started to suggest that they check out Zotero, but they stopped me to explain that their teachers already had them all using it.

Thank you for getting the kids started off on the right foot, professor!

[malshe]

If you use Zotero regularly and can afford it, please consider becoming a paying member.

https://www.zotero.org/getinvolved

[dakiol]

I've been using Zotero as my "book" organizer. I have all my epubs, pdfs, everything there. Since version 7 I think you can read PDFs within Zotero, and I love it. I keep custom labels so I easily search for stuff. The only feature I don't use is everything about citation (funny enough). Before Zotero I had everything in file system directories, but I wanted the feeling of having one place (one app) where I could see all my books by category, by read/no-read, etc.

Having said this, I will probably wait a bit before upgrading to V8 (since I use it everyday, so I wouldn't like to face bugs and the like)

[itsrobreally]

My experience with Zotero was similar - I tried adding my ebook library to it as an alternative to Calibre because I really want to sort of categorize and easily reference my books and/or get like library call number groupings which is not trivial with Calibre.

I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre.

Someday I will write an indexer with either a web search tool or an LLM interface to better find info on my books but for now I just spend too much time browsing through the files which makes me sad (but not sad enough yet to overcome the laziness)

[dhash]

Post Mendeley shutdown, zotero has been an awesome replacement (while not being controlled by Elsevier). Given the amount of PDF's that I see during researchy times in my life, it's been an absolute godsend. Highly reccommend!

[angry_octet]

Zotero is the best. However, if your brain is highly tuned to use Mendeley Desktop, note that they backed down on killing it, they just won't add new features (where that leaves security updates I'm not sure).

https://blog.mendeley.com/2025/07/09/mendeley-is-not-going-a...

[sureglymop]

Is it easily self hostable yet?

I'm glad part of their stack is open source but I just wish they made it as easy as a compose file to run this on prem.

[majkinetor]

Zotero is very good nowadays. Its unbearably slow though, and it doesn't seem this will ever get better.

[mft_]

Could you share how/when it is slow? We’re considering using this at work and I’d love your feedback.

[trostaft]

Love Zotero, have been using it since I started out as a researcher. I've found the PDF view to have noticeably more lag than either preview or skim, but I can live with that for entire package (and can just open the papers in those readers).

[Scene_Cast2]

I discovered it a few weeks ago. It solved my problem of having a hundred arxiv tabs open. Highly recommended. I'm also looking forward to trying out the new annotations feature.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Zotero is fantastic. But I really would love to see organic bibtex support. Betterbibtex works, but it would be better that it were intrinsic feature rather than an add-on.

[ricksunny]

I hope they've fixed the stability issues for Zotero's Google Docs plugin when citation count gets in excess of 100+. It's a special kind of terror when the bibliography breaks and fails tracking with superscripts in the text body. The resulting necessary 'save early, save often' behavior results in accumulating hundreds of manuscript versions till submission.

[rossant]

Zotero had been “not good enough” for many years. Since version 7, it has become nearly perfect for me. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

[BolsunBacset]

For those using Zotero for knowledge management or bookmarking, can you give us some examples of how?

[smuenkel]

Honestly the piece of software in my life that I have the least issues with ever. So so good.

[ktallett]

I'm delighted it's now become available on ARM as I now can have it on my lab computer (Pi) and the Pocket Reform that I use day to day. I still need to come up with an optimal folder system for it though.

[Alifatisk]

Doesn't title have space for more context like "tool to collect, organize, annotate, cite research" or something?

[arresin]

What a blast from the past (for me at least). When I used this 5 or so years ago (17 years ago) it was extremely effective.

[catgirlinspace]

Coincidentally, I was just looking at using Zotero on Linux this morning after having used it previously on Mac for some classes.

[Tomte]

I‘ve been using it as a general bookmark manager (think Pinboard or Raindrop) for a while now. It‘s a bit quirky, but very powerful with all the management and annotation possibilities.

You might say it was just another excuse to curate my thousands of bookmarks and recreate a new tagging structure yet again, but… well, you wouldn‘t be wrong. :-)

[zvr]

Another enthusiastic Zotero user here. Current library has 13,775 items and for a low yearly price one can have multi-device sync and support the project. I'm also syncing to a server I own, for complete data ownership (just in case).

[sureglymop]

How do you sync to your own server? Do you mean just "some" data or did you figure out how to self host their open source (but undocumented) backend?

[ifh-hn]

> amazing tool thank you

This is a sneaky edit completely different from the original post I replied to, which was about how bloated zotero was and how the op had uni stalled immediately and gone back to text files on disk.

[vitorsr]

Zotero is built on top of Firefox ESR.

[ifh-hn]

Im unaware of another open source tool that provides all zotero does that's lighter weight. I can guarantee it's better than using text files on disk.