Reference manager that is also great for reading PDFs and managing annotations and workflows.
If you can imagine academic reading and writing without a reference manager, you shouldn’t. It should literally be imaginable. There are many options and Zotero is definitely one of the best. But that is not why it should be on your Christmas academic productivity stocking stuffer list – not least because it is free.
With version 6 released in Spring 2022, Zotero has changed the game of desktop academic reading. Not only has it included a built-in PDF reader, but it also made it one of the best ones available.
And now there’s also an iPad app which also has that same reader built in. It not only lets you highlight and take comments, it also lets you tag your highlights, export them into notes attached to your paper and then organise them in different ways.
The other new feature Zotero has is a much better note-taking interface. While it’s not great for lecture notes, it is the ideal place to keep notes on your readings.
Zotero’s integration with popular notetaking apps like Notion or Obsidian is also another plus.
With the latest release, Zotero is simply one of the best ways to read academic PDFs on the desktop and a decent one on the iPad.
In addition, it makes it easy to organise notes and highlights. Any highlight can be tagged, inserted into notes and linked to other readings.
The notes and quotes can then be directly inserted into a Word document using the Zotero plugin. This saves on cutting and pasting confusion.
Zotero is also probably the best choice for collaboration and sharing of libraries with a very good web-interface.
Because it is Open Source, it also has a fairly active plugin ecosystem and a number of public guides to learn from.
The biggest downside compared to competitors is that Zotero only gives you 300MB of online storage for free. You can extend it to 2GB for $20/year or add more money for 6GB or unlimited. Storing the library in Onedrive or Dropbox is possible but you have to be careful to close Zotero before opening it elsewhere.
Compared to some others, Zotero’s design looks rather dated but this should not matter to most people.
If you would like to get some hands on time with the reMarkable or any of our other devices or tools, please book a visit to the Reading and Writing Innovation Lab.