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by Eejd

I am a scientist, a Zotero beta tester, and a past user of almost all the major reference manager systems. I am providing this one star review because, while I am a firm supporter of Zotero (and open source and open science/academia models), this app has failed to improve basic, core functionality during the entire time I have used it from pre-launch betas to the current version. Basic things like being able to reliably import a reference from a webpage works differently across iOS browsers, often failing completely. Downloading a PDF from a publishers site and uploading is often the last resort solution—but one that fails when you don’t have accesses to the PDF from your current network (i.e. when you have institutional access only via VPN or being on the institutional network). Further, basic problems that are reported to the developers, specific improvements that are technically easy to implement and feature requests simply do not get responded to or integrated. I will continue to use the app as I want to support the Zotero ecosystem (and pay for a plan). But I cannot understand how the most basic aspects of a researchers workflow continue to fail constantly or take forever…

by Gately_m

Overall I like the app. I like that I can manage citations and notes all in one place, and link full text. If the app consistently worked, I’d give it 5 stars. The issue is that it doesn’t consistently work; it crashes frequently when adding new resources or notes. I’m prompted to submit a forum post with the error message, but the popup disappears when I click the link to the forums, so I can no longer copy the error log to submit. If these issues are corrected, I’m likely to purchase additional storage in the future; as it is, I’ll try to muddle on with the app a bit longer, but won’t stick with it if it continues to crash.

by ErikG94

I decided to give Zotero a try because I need a place where I can store all the academic articles I read, and Apple Finder has not been working properly lately. I like how you can order your files and add metadata on Zotero, but I still need a system through which I can search specific words within the documents, e.g., when I type “content-based instruction”, the apps shows me all the articles where that word combination appears. I can’t see that Zotero can do this at the moment, whereas Apple Finder can to some extent, and iCloud subscription is cheaper and way more versatile than Zotero’s. This is a very promising project though.