The Quintessence of Ham

Today Olivia Jud­son fea­tures Zotero in her excel­lent sci­ence blog, The Wild Side. In a gen­er­ally pos­i­tive review Jud­son points to Zotero’s ease of use and abil­ity to grab meta­data from a vari­ety of sources. For­tu­nately for Zoterons, the fea­tures that Jud­son finds lack­ing in Zotero are already present in either the cur­rent 1.0.7 release (inte­gra­tion with research data­bases like JSTOR, PubMed, Web of Sci­ence) or in the 1.5 Sync Pre­view (auto­matic asso­ci­a­tion of PDF metadata).

In the notes accom­pa­ny­ing her post, Jud­son draws atten­tion to the grow­ing prob­lem of siloed data, with aca­d­e­mic research increas­ingly housed in sub­scrip­tion data­bases. In attempt­ing to address this impor­tant prob­lem, I would note that we are far ahead of any com­pet­ing soft­ware, offer­ing over 260 site “trans­la­tors,” com­pared to Papers’ 14, allow­ing users of Zotero to draw on an unpar­al­leled array of open and gated resources as they under­take their own research.