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Academic Discussions => Research & Scholarship => Topic started by: delsur on May 29, 2020, 07:17:28 AM

Title: Zotero Word plug-in
Post by: delsur on May 29, 2020, 07:17:28 AM
Hi everyone,

Does anybody have experience using the Zotero plug-in for Microsoft Word? I've been using Zotero mostly to generate bibliographies. I'd like venture into using it for in-text citations and footnotes. I'm hesitant because many years ago I wrote my dissertation using such features in Endnotes and it was disastrous with freezing documents and all kinds of glitches.

Thank you for your help!
Title: Re: Zotero Word plug-in
Post by: nonntt on May 29, 2020, 02:21:58 PM
I've used it extensively for a book and some articles. I can't imagine doing a serious project without it.
Title: Re: Zotero Word plug-in
Post by: polly_mer on May 29, 2020, 05:44:20 PM
Quote from: nonntt on May 29, 2020, 02:21:58 PM
I've used it extensively for a book and some articles. I can't imagine doing a serious project without it.

Come over to the Bibdesk and LaTeX side.  I do serious projects all the time that way.

Zotero + Word was unpleasant several years ago when it was first recommended to me.
Title: Re: Zotero Word plug-in
Post by: adel9216 on May 29, 2020, 08:50:32 PM
I can't live without it. And I love Zotero.
Title: Re: Zotero Word plug-in
Post by: delsur on June 01, 2020, 07:54:19 AM
Thank you for the replies. For those who do use Zotero's Word plug-in, are there any glitches or quirks that I should be aware of?

Thank you!
Title: Re: Zotero Word plug-in
Post by: Puget on June 01, 2020, 09:25:25 AM
A warning-- while the word plug in may work well (I haven't used it extensively) the google docs plug in is a disaster! We tried it for a grant and it turned out to be a total nightmare-- worked great at first, then when we got to about 70 citations broke entirely, such that the only way to insert new citations was to keep making new copies of the google doc. Help was no help at all (basically blamed it on google docs). Never, ever, again.

Recently I've been using Paperpile for google docs with no problems so far, and it works much better for collaboration since it is not interfacing with a collection that lives elsewhere, you just add the citations directly there by search with the DOI or other info.

In Word, I have been using Papers since version 1 in grad school. It has now been bought by ReadCube and they have gone to a subscription model, but I'm still holding on to my old version for now.
Title: Re: Zotero Word plug-in
Post by: wuggish on June 11, 2020, 11:26:31 AM
I use this exclusively and love it. It's worked well with collaborators who use Mendeley. I once had trouble with duplicate references which resulted in me having to manually search and add all of my coauthor's references to my library and fix the whole reference list, but I'm not sure of the software causing the incompatibility.

Changing references with Track Changes on sometimes breaks all the formatting and spits out code instead. I make sure to toggle Track Changes for this purpose.
Title: Re: Zotero Word plug-in
Post by: delsur on June 12, 2020, 07:43:28 AM
Thanks, everyone. I started to use it and it's been great so far.