Zotero, RefMan and Jabref

Zotero is a rather nice bibliography manager which can export references in a number of formats, including BibTex.

I was playing with reference managers last week trying to work out a set of workflows to get the information exported for reloading into a different solution - it’s the old problem of tracking people’s publication history and loading it into a research management system.

There’s a good little BibTex exporter for Zotero known as autozotbib that works as a plugin for both the desktop client and firefox that pushes the records out in BibTex as they are updated.

If you use dropbox for filesharing you can of course output the export file directly to Dropbox, which makes it readily accessible to a number of other reference management products, including JabRef.

In the course of playing about with this I also tried installing RefMan on my Android tablet, and telling it to read the Zotero output file - which it did.

Now I’m by no means a power Zotero user, but one thing I do sometimes need to do is check references and information, and something that increasingly I find myself going to a tablet to do so because of their extreme portability rather than using either a Chromebook or one of my aging netbooks. While I’ve only got one way synchronization - ie all the changes have to be made to the Zotero end of things, this little trick makes it comparatively easy to search reference lists with a native (and free) android app …

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