Matt Price wrote:
...
my main interest in broaching the subject is to help my colleagues, who
all use endnote, to move to openoffice.
Hmm ... I guess that depends.
Do your colleagues express interest in moving away from Word? If yes,
what kinds of sacrifices are they willing to make to do so?
In the context of Endnote, they will have to give up
cite-while-you-write functionality.
if indeed matt finds that he
can move his research group to openoffice, that would make a difference.
despite zotero's manifest superiority in many areas, most of my
colleagues are more wedded to endnote than to any other program.
How do they express the opinion that they are "wedded" to Endnote? Is it
something like Matt Y's point that "yes, in theory, I could move, but I
rely on citation styles that Zotero does not support, and I don't have
the time or skills to create my own"? Or is it more like "I love Endnote
and will never consider anything else?"
I sympathize with people in the first camp, because while Zotero using
CSL will pay-off big time longer-term, there's no doubt that we need to
get over the shorter-term hump of more limited number of styles, and no
GUI editor.
But that will come.
Also, Zotero now has the same problem Endnote has: it's single user and
local. This makes it awkward to sync data across machines, or to
collaborate. It's not eh Zotero is any worse than Endnote on this count;
it's just not as good as it should/can be.
But Zotero 2.0 is going to kick major ass, offering the ability to
access your data from different machines, create and collaborate in the
context of groups, etc., etc. This will go WAY beyond what is possible
with Endnote.
In short, I'd encourage your colleagues to experiment with Zotero now,
perhaps simply copying over the reference data they want to Endnote as
they go. It's easy and free for them to do this, and it they don't have
to give up Endnote. At a certain point, they will probably switch, when
they realize it really is a better tool. And when they do that, the
functionality they get will be a) better than what they get in Endnote
(since Zotero supports cite-while-you-write-like functionality within
OOo), and b) compatible with Word (at least that's the goal; that one
can collaborate on documents between OOo and Word).
Bruce
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