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The recent and rightfully praised comparison of Zotero and EndNote raises many excellent points. A considerable amount of the article and the discussion it generated addresses citation prowess—the ability for the software to get properly formatted citations into your document (complicated by choice of word processor, of course). Such a focus makes perfect sense because citations function as a crucial professional apparatus (if not discourse) that must match the (identifying?) standards of one’s field and publication outlets.

But while citation formatting is one major reason to use bibliographic software, it isn’t necessarily the only or even primary reason, especially in the humanities. We should also think more broadly about the curation and sustainability of our reference libraries and how we might shake up our assumptions about what we value in our tools. The inevitable advice that one should employ the tool that best fits your needs or workflow is correct, provided we’re able to step back and evaluate whether aspects of our workflow couldn’t be improved. I worry that feature by feature comparisons don’t really facilitate such reflection or highlight the values that aren’t so easily compared head to head.

As wholly dependent as i am on Zotero for managing my reference library, i don’t use it for creating footnotes (or endnotes, which i hate). This may be considered anything from stupidity to blasphemy (or both). It certainly wasn’t a decision taken lightly. But after experimenting with many different workflows, i realized that i had drunk the citation insertion kool-aid, which made perfectly accurate citations coming directly from Zotero (or whatever) more important in theory than it ever became in practice.

Besides general organization, one reason i first used reference management software was because i wanted all references tied to some tool that could reformat all citations with a few clicks. What if i needed to reformat all my citations to submit to a particular journal?!? It turns out that after many years I’ve never done that or even known anyone who has wanted to do that (of course in theory people have found this very valuable). Similarly, i thought i would want to cite the same source in multiple places and should be able to do so by clicking on an item in my library rather than copy and paste. Turns out that i don’t really do this very much, either. Both of these “needs” ended up being more extreme use cases than practical ones. But maybe i’m just not as productive as i should be.

So why don’t i use the citation functionality? As robust and powerful as the CSL formatting language is, it doesn’t work all that well with the rather messy variety of sources i cite and how i like to splice commentary in with citations in footnotes. This is not to say it’s impossible, but that it takes me more time to battle Zotero than to manage the notes independently. This is what i find remarkable about the ubiquitous debate about citation accuracy amongst various software options and citation mechanisms. It doesn’t take that long to manage citations by hand (while you’re walking uphill to/from school in the snow, etc.). Yes, i have to manually correct ibids and short and long titles, but i just do this as a last revision so that i’m not constantly redoing it. It takes a little extra time, but seriously less time than trying to get Zotero (or especially anything else) to output the exact format i want.

To create the reference in the first place, i usually copy (or drag and drop) the citation from Zotero to Word to get the bulk of the thing, then edit by hand. I rarely need to edit it again, and i don’t have to worry about any particular formatting problems or losing edits when Zotero reformats citations. If you’re citing mostly more recent and standardized sources, and you don’t pollute your notes with prose, these concerns are less relevant. But anyone who regularly deals with non-standardized sources might refocus from citation formatting (regardless of software preference) to other virtues that facilitate long term library maintenance and organization. As for creating bibliographies, i maintain (with surprisingly little effort) a collection of works cited for each writing project, readings course, etc. When i need a bibliography, i can simply generate one from the collection and edit it as need be. Usually the need is rather little, as bibliography formatting is usually more straightforward than that of notes.

As for speed, I think it’s the ultimate red herring in bibliographic software. Granted, efficiency is a real concern and i get a blood pressure spike whenever i see the spinning color wheel for any reason. Other similarly impatient folks have legitimately complained that Zotero is too slow under certain (sometimes bizarre) conditions. Some of this is due to its dependency on Firefox, a dependency that is being dissolved as i write. But the amount of time i spend waiting on Zotero in comparison to the time i spend researching and writing (not to mention other distractions) is so absurdly small, it’s laughable—even if it’s an easy an check in the +/- columns of a tool comparison. But missing the big picture in favor of the obvious metrics is not unlike the beer-bellied cyclist spending an extra $1000 for a lighter bike or a high-performance derailleur. Actually, just skip lunch.

OK. i lied. I do care about speed in one respect, namely the way that Zotero is magically convenient for quickly getting references from library catalogs or databases into a library (which i usually do by hand rather than via massive searches; i prefer a lean library), thus saving tons of time otherwise lost to manually populating Zotero items. More important for my sanity and future utility of my library, it’s a snap (in the process of saving an item) to get references into the right collections and subcollections. I use collections to denote stuff i need to read on a certain topic, stuff i’ve read but need to work into a project, stuff i have consulted but won’t use or cite, stuff i need to consult on my next visit to national library of medicine, etc. Of course Zotero is not the only tool that can help keep your library organized (nor are collections), but i’ve found this method the easiest, even though i resisted collections for some time simply because they were a new way of organizing for me.

Incidentally, i might mention another way that Zotero is flexible that i came to appreciate later on–namely in note-taking with the detached tinyMCE window next to the PDF i’m reading, or just if i want a small window because i’m doing other things at the same time. And those notes are of course immediately available from wherever i’m accessing my library. Once upon a time i thought i should be annotating PDFs, but found that i preferred to have notes in a simple text box that i can see at a glance. The annotations were, like citations, more interesting in theory than in practice for me. Zotero is not flexible in all ways, of course. I have remained frustrated by its lack of custom item types for many years. I won’t enumerate the many more valuable features that have been implemented in the meantime. When I stopped worrying about citing everything with Zotero, I stopped caring as much about custom item types.

Flexibility can built into workflows as well. People have also complained about wanting to use other browsers than Firefox; some have even abandoned Zotero because they prefer another browser. Preserve workflow at all costs! I have found it perfectly easy to use Firefox for finding and saving references and to manage my library, while using Chrome for everything else. Having Firefox open just for Zotero is really no different than running a standalone application like EndNote. In any case, as Zotero decouples from Firefox, browser issues are a diminishing concern for the end user.

Citations, speed, and other automation features aside, one simply cannot neglect the value of openness. One commenter mentioned that openness should have been a part of the original comparison, and Croxall defended its omission by saying that it’s not a concern of the general user, even if it should be. But it IS a crucial concern for long term use, which is where any bibliographic manager pays real dividends. It’s about neither the philosophy nor the supposed moral superiority of open source. With EndNote (and others), you’re buying into a system that the producer has every incentive to keep you locked into. Are you then obligated to buy upgrades? If you don’t, can you still get your data (and modifications to it) out? I completely agree that it’s not unreasonable to pay even $100 for software you that you like and use. But it’s not just a one time payment, but that amount every few years. Or your library won’t sync. Or you can’t import new records. Or it won’t work with your OS upgrade. Or whatever. But there will be a reason why you’ll need to pay again, indefinitely.

Yes, virtually all reference managers can all export in various standard formats. But i’m sure i’m not the only one who has moved libraries more times than i care to admit and who has concluded that it’s never easy, never lossless, and only slightly preferable to, say, contracting the plague. This is especially true if you have non-standard or modified items in your library. Openness does have real implications for the average user, and not just because closed source and proprietary formats are the kryptonite of the digital humanities. Even if typical users do not value openness, comparative articles ought to explain why they should.

It is indeed convenient and useful to compare products and establish winners and losers in functionality. The enthusiastic response to Croxall’s informative and well-written article shows how much so. But in looking for the “best” software for managing citations, we can’t lose sight of the long term sustainability of our libraries in favor of marginal differences between routine tasks. And we need to shed our workflow blinders to recognize other possibilities and features of the tools besides those that fit well with old habits—or desired new ones, like a possibly utopian need for seamless citation integration.

I certainly don’t mean to suggest that my priorities or methods should be anyone else’s. I do enjoy reading how people use the same tools i do, as i can always learn something. But if we do want to put products head to head, i think it’s worth considering how Zotero is about far more than citing references, especially in terms of openness and flexibility that results from it not having a financial agenda tied to how we use it or its social network.

§ 7 Responses to “tyranny of the citation”

• Avram Lyon says:

  May 5, 2011 at 1:37 pm

  I’m very much in agreement on just about every point. The magic is not citation processing– it’s that Zotero provides a flexible and intuitive way work with your sources, plan your library and archive trips, send reading lists, and generally know what you’re working on, so you can find what you need when you need it.

  One of the first articles about Firefox Scholar mentioned the real benefit of having a system that makes it easier to document sources than to not:

  Could such a browser foster plagiarism?

  On the contrary, Mr. Cohen says, arguing that because the software will clearly track where all of the material it stores has come from, it will help scholars avoid accidental plagiarism.

  “Inadvertent plagiarism is at a higher probability” when scholars record sources manually, he says.

  In Jeffrey R. Young, “George Mason U. Team Works on Browser That Will Aid Scholarly Research,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 16, 2005, Volume 52, Issue 17, sec. Technology : Information Technology. chronicle.com/article/George-Mason-U-Team-Works-on/25003

  And of course I didn’t have to misquote or misattribute that because it was so ridiculously easy to keep it in my library.

  Reply
• Avram Lyon says:

  May 5, 2011 at 1:39 pm

  But if you use Zotero-in-Firefox alongside Chrome, you should look into www.zotero.org/support/kb/connector_enabled — so you can still save items right into Zotero from Chrome as well. All the upside of Standalone, none of the downside.

  Reply
• Yvonne Perkins says:

  May 5, 2011 at 5:45 pm

  You have said what I have thought, but was too shy to say – “it doesn’t take that long to manage citations by hand”. Many of us grapple with non-standard citations. I have found it quicker and easier to finesse these citations manually rather than to spend time trying to manipulate settings in software and find that I still have to run through my citations and give them a final manual tweak.

  Reply
• » Zotero Versus The Quintessence of Ham says:

  May 6, 2011 at 12:39 am

  [...] vs. End­note,” where the debate cen­tered mostly around issues of cita­tion fidelity. As Fred Gibbs notes, how­ever, “while cita­tion for­mat­ting is one major rea­son to use bib­li­o­graphic [...]

  Reply
• Brian Croxall says:

  May 6, 2011 at 9:52 am

  Thanks for the thoughtful response to my post and for your kind words about what I’ve written. I feel badly that my comments will be much shorter than they should be in response, but tempis (and my work week) fugit.

  I agree that it doesn’t take that long to manage citations by hand–depending on the field you work in. I know people in public health and similar fields that use hundreds or thousands of citations in the work that they do. The humanities are relatively source poor compared to many other fields. When you get on the scale of the thousands, I believe that citation managers really do help you with time. And while I had to hand-check all of my citations at the end of my dissertation, I still think it saved me time. And I’ll go ahead and say that I’ve had to reformat entire articles from Chicago to MLA and so on as I’ve submitted them to journals. The tools save me time.

  Using a citation manager might not always be efficient, but knowing that you’re preserving the work that you’re doing and the library that you’re building for a future self’s research can still make it worth the time. In fact, this is where I start all of my instruction sessions of citation managers. In my view, the point is not so much the formatting of papers as it is the preservation of a virtual file cabinet of research.

  And while we’re on the subject of preservation for the future, you’re absolutely right that we should be talking about openness. On more reflection, I think including a bit of discussion of open vs. closed would have been the right thing to do in the post. And clearly Zotero wins there. I think the hard thing is that those who are open-source enthusiasts place so much emphasis on this one feature that it they forget that for most people it is only that: a feature. It’s not the end-all or be-all for most people (whether or not is should be is another ball of wax). And so the openness of one tool cannot be the end point in a conversation.

  People have questioned whether or not I put too much emphasis on speed (where EndNote wins, in my book). But the post was intended to explore my own perspective on the tools and it therefore reflects my workflows. These are the reasons why I like each tool. And the comments are there for others to say what they like about each one. And I’m learning quite a bit. Somehow I’d not noticed before that you can pop out the tinyMCE note-taking window in Zotero. That’s something very useful that I’ll be taking with me in the future; you’re right that it’s much better than annotating the PDFs.

  Of course, one thing that I didn’t talk about in the article as it was outside the scope is the fact that there might very well be some pleasure to be taken in working through the process of using a tool rather than working by hand. We grow to love a well-worn tool even when a new one is available because we like using that tool. We might even know that it’s not the best tool, but it’s ours and we’ve made it ours. Tool use need not be entirely rational.

  Reply
• Sean Takats says:

  May 6, 2011 at 10:19 am

  Brian– I agree with Fred that your article is entirely reasonable and provides extremely useful real user perspective. You’re neither a starry-eyed new adopter nor a grumpy complainer. Instead you’re just acting as a regular researcher trying to get some work done with the tools available.

  I would disagree, however, that openness is just “a feature.” In fact, it can be the source of quite a lot of other features, and it’s a critical element of sustainability. I won’t belabor the point here, since I’ve already done just that in this response to your post and Fred’s:

  quintessenceofham.org/2011/05/06/zotero-versus/

  Reply
• Des citations (et un lien)… | Zotero francophone says:

  May 6, 2011 at 3:12 pm

  [...] bibliographique? C’est la question que se pose Fred Gibbs dans un excellent post sur la tyrannie de la citation, qui fait suite à la chronique de Brian Croxall pour ProfHacker comparant zotero et Endnote. Fred [...]

  Reply

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