Comment by nanna | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanna | Hacker News Reader

I used Zotero through my MA and into my PhD, when I discovered and began writing in LaTeX in emacs/AucTeX instead of LibreOffice. I used the Better BibTeX plugin [0] to maintain a BibLaTeX file, but as I developed my emacs skills I moved to RefTeX.

At that point I realised that my BibLaTeX file was really a mess. Better BibTeX created tons of needless double curly brackets {{like this}} in the BibLaTeX file, making searching it directly a pain. And it created lots of @misc entries, the BibLaTeX entry of last resort, when it should have made @url's and other things.

Zotero has massively benefited my work, but it's also been something of a training wheel which in the longer term slowed me down. Emacs/AucTeX/RefTeX does everything Zotero does (at least according to my use) but faster, cleaner, more holistically, and with more features (eg crossref'ing entries). And two years on I'm still cleaning up that Better BibTeX's BibLaTeX file.

[0] https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/

* edited because I confused AucTeX with RefTeX.

I guess I don't see how you can easily add citations without something like Zotero (or its closed source equivalent Endnote). At least in my use case, I go to Pubmed and click the Zotero Chrome plugin to add the reference to Zotero. What do you do, manually enter the info?

Nah, not manual at all.

I just call up RefTeX by hitting ctrl-x + (or "C-x +" in emacs parlance). This calls up a list of all possible references and a fuzzy search box which lets me narrow it down. When I've found my reference I have ten options, including:

f1: Open associated pdf, url or doi

f3: Insert the citation into my thesis and then be asked for what kind of note I want to add (footnote? Title? author name? Year? Just a bibliography entry?), then any text to add before the reference (eg, "This argument has been made by,"), then after (p. 67). -- This answeres your question

f7: Attach pdf to email

f9: Show notes, if there's an .org file of the same name.

f10: Add pdf to library

If RefTeX can't find my query, not only does it ask if I want to add a new one, it asks whether to search various databases for it including arXiv, DBLP (computer science bibliography), Google Scholar, Bodleian Library, HAL, Library of Congress, British Library and others.

Adding entries to the database is as simple as editing a plain text file, and BibTeX provides quick shortcuts for all the different kinds of entries, checks them for you and provides a sane and customizable key.

Everything is completely integrated - my writing, my pdf library, my org notes, my bibliography database, my email as well as my thesaurus (wordnut), my pdf reader (pdf-tools) and my git repo (magit). It's just brilliant. All together it makes emacs the ultimate writers tool, as far as I'm concerned.

I think what your OP was referring to is not adding a citation to a document that you're editing, but rather ingesting PDFs and bibliographic data from the web.

I love Emacs (not as much as you do it seems ;) but Zotero is amazing for ingesting academic references including fulltext and bibliographic data from the web. One click of a button in your browser, and everything is ready to read and cite.

(Source: Wrote quite a number of papers and co-authored one textbook, all using Zotero. My workflow was Zotero for ingestion -> per-publication bibtex files for authoring)

Aha, apologies, my misunderstanding. Looks like I got a bit emaxcited 8)

So either you add them manually or you query Crossref, arXiv, DBLP or HAL (French open archive) within emacs and then can copy their bibtex entry from there. No pdf or web reference importer as far as I'm aware. Yet!

AucTeX can save snapshots of entire Web pages with images, PDFs, etc. in a personal library?

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