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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

I've tried JabRef, Zotero, and Mendeley. The latter two seem more modern and friendly in some ways but I prefer JabRef. Works well with LaTeX/BiBTeX and it looks more old-school, which I like. Mendeley's advantage is that it has free online storage.

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I use zotero with the better bibtex extension. But when I finalize a document, I use jabref and its 'make a new library from .aux file' tool which can then create a .bib file with only the references used in the document. Much easier to archive than my full zotero library with thousands of entries. Also makes it easier to fine tune any edits to the .bib references for that specific document and template.

Same here, except that I gather all the bibliography entries into a Zotero collection organized by paper and only export that to the latex workspace rather than using JabRef. Works a treat and keeps the size of the .bib file small.

How do you do the collection per paper? Is that manual or automatable?

For me, that's manual—I make sure everything I've cited is in the .bib file, and move papers into another collection if they end up not being relevant for a particular paper.

This is probably an automatable task, but it's generally not too much of a burden to do manually. I add a 'needs-review' tag to papers I've identified in a literature review, and categorize it when I get around to reading it.

If Zotero, or more appropriately better-bibtex, had a 'make collection from .aux file' option, than that would be fantastic. For some documents there can be such a number of references that doing this manually would be a chore. But having that collection in zotero would be useful by itself as a resource. Maybe I'll head over and make that suggestion...

I just use Zotero to copy-paste bibtex references into a .bib file as I go along. You can do this using the "bibtex generic" citation style.

Have you tried zotero 7?

It is currently in beta but they polished the UI and the UX is now much better than before. If not, I would recommend that you give it a try.

Zotero 7 is excellent. I also like the official Zotero iPad app, which is quite decent to read and annotate papers in your Zotero library on the go.

The new iPad app for Zotero 7 is great. Editing just seems to work. I use my WebDAV server for storage and my changes just show up across devices without worrying. Really great way to manage papers.

Now if only there were an iPad with a screen like the Remarkable (or a Zotero app for the Remarkable).

Zotero 7 is the first usable version in 15 years for me. And it's great.

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