[Papyrus-L] Alternatives to Papyrus

[O'Brien, Mark]

I transferred my 3,500 papyrus records to Zotero a few months back, just to see how it compared.
No real problems with the transfer - except that, so far as I'm aware, Zotero doesn't support beyond the standard ASCII character set.  So, lots of funny symbols replaced the familiar Scandinavian/Eastern European author names present in Papyrus.  Some references (esp from the 'others' category) didn't seem to go across very well, unsurprisingly. Also, error messages about the process not completing (see below) resulted in me inputting in blocks of 500 references at a time which seemed to please Zotero much more.

I find that loading up the 3,500 records each time you want to access Zotero is quite time-consuming.  Going into Zotero once you are in Firefox isn't something I'd do unless I really planned to use it.  The delay prompts Firefox/Zotero(dunno which) to send an error message stating that the process isnt completing.  Tell it to carry on and all turns out ok.   

Importing references from Google Scholar was the main draw for me - very easy and simple to do, including attaching abstracts as a notes page.  That bit was great - although again an extended ASCII character set doesn't appear to be supported by Google Scholar.

Setting tags (keywords in Papyrus) is, however, a real chore.  It takes an inordinate amount of time to register each tag each time you set it (you have to set each tag in turn - not multiple tags in the way Papyrus allows) such that you really don't want to do more than the minimal amount.  Here Papyrus scores so much better. 

Putting references into (Word) documents, and drawing up the bibliographic list was simple.  I used the standard output rather than attempting to write my own journal-specific one.  The latter does seem to be feasible - although the Xotero Forum indicated there also seems to be one or two folk who can do this when requested - never did work out how well that worked.  You've then of course got the hassle of a) reconverting the gobbledygook into accents, umlauts, etc - and if you're that concerned, set the extra text for those references imported direct from Google Scholar to Zotero.

As has been mentioned elsewhere Zotero is rapidly developing and so some of the issues that I've raised above may already have been resolved and/or some of my issues may just be ignorance on my part and I'm doing Zotero a disservice.  However, there was enough to worry me about converting entirely.  I'm now using Zotero as a rapid bibliographic capture mechanism and transferring a subset of the most useful references from Zotero to Papyrus where I can use the extra search keyword capacity and extended character set to avoide irritating some of my continental colleagues!.

Hope that helps


-----Original Message-----
From: papyrus-l-bounces at ResearchSoftwareDesign.com [mailto:papyrus-l-bounces at ResearchSoftwareDesign.com] On Behalf Of Ann L Greer
Sent: 20 July 2008 21:58
To: Papyrus Discussion List
Cc: Papyrus Discussion List
Subject: [Papyrus-L] Alternatives to Papyrus

I would also like to know if others have found this program a successful alternative to Papyrus. The other one I found which offers the notecards feature is Citation but I have not tried either.  Can anyone comment? 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Logies" <logies at web.de>
To: "Papyrus Discussion List" <papyrus-l at ResearchSoftwareDesign.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2008 3:09:51 AM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: Re: [Papyrus-L] Could Zotero an alternative to Papyrus?

Has anybody tried to export from Zotero and import into Papyrus and vice versa? Which formats will work?

It`s some years back that I used Papyrus but I remember it`s flexible bibliographic styles and its robustness. Zotero is a great tool but missing these features. Its plug-ins for Word, Openoffice and Neooffice work, but are still beta software and may mess up the text. I tested the plug-in for Openoffice.

Is there any recommendation which of Openoffice`s file formats to use for cooperating with Papyrus?

Thanks

Michael

At 25.11.2007 14:59 Ane Ortega wrote:


> Dear all



> Some time ago I got in contact with the users of this list asking for 

> advice on an alternative to Papyrus. I was particularly keen to find a 

> software which allowed storing notecards the way Papyrus does. Among 

> the many replies for which I warmly thank you, Duncan Branley 

> suggested Zotero (www.zotero.org), still being developed at that time, 

> but which is now available.



> I have looked into it and it looks very promising. I wondered if 

> anybody is using it and can tell me how you are finding it and how the 

> migration went?



> With thanks



> Ane



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Ann Lennarson Greer
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