Zotero

I use a 12.9” IPad Pro as my sole computer while working through another masters’s degree. As most know, it is as powerful as most laptops, but is occasionally restricted because some apps, like Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Office, and Zotero, are designed for phones an are thus more limited in capability. For Zotero, the initial challenge: none of the popular tutorials cover Zotero for IOS. Some of my learning curve was simply from my recent switch from lifelong Microsoft use to Apple across the board. However, once I poked around enough to figure out how it works, I’ve discovered Zotero for iOS will do everything EXCEPT directly connect to Word iOS for automatic citation entry. Still, inserting a footnote and copying the automatically-generated citation isn’t bad at all. Overall, I’m very happy with Zotero for iOS!

Zotero is exactly what every researcher needs, and few (if any) do it better than Zotero. However, on iPadOS, until a few basic tweaks are made, Zotero will not be better than a well-organized iPad files app. - Annotating with an Apple Pencil comes in a few colors, all of which are completely opaque. There is no sense in highlighting anything if you cannot see what has been highlighted. - While editing file information, leaving the app (not closing, leaving) erases all progress made. This is particularly frustrating when trying to fill in information needed for a citation. Forgot what year the article was published, so you went back to the database on safari to check? Too bad, when you come back the title, author, publisher, and everything else has been lost and needs to be entered again. - After a file has been made, you cannot add attachments. This would be useful for articles that come in two PDFs, text and examples. EDIT: The developers respond to comments and seem to genuinely want to improve the app. And with the number of bugs fixed recently, that is apparent. As bugs continued to be ironed out, this app will be indispensable.

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…