I've been a paying member for a few years now. Part of it is for the storage (PDF packrat here) but mostly because I want to support development. Please consider supporting them if they help you in your work—they're worth it. https://www.zotero.org/storage
Refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.
There are many software recommendations that seem sort of hype-y: Obsidian, Notion, Keybase, etc. Zotero is not that and is a daily driver for me for years. It has also replaced Calibre for me although YMMV there.
I used "better bibtex" (?) to ensure files were reliably renamed and moved to an appropriate folder, all automatically.
A real set-and-forget setup that ran without hitch for years.
now i'm interested in the answer to your question - i have my own machine running 24/7 that i would love to use. i like the software enough that maybe i'd pay/donate
Thank you for getting the kids started off on the right foot, professor!
Having said this, I will probably wait a bit before upgrading to V8 (since I use it everyday, so I wouldn't like to face bugs and the like)
I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre.
Someday I will write an indexer with either a web search tool or an LLM interface to better find info on my books but for now I just spend too much time browsing through the files which makes me sad (but not sad enough yet to overcome the laziness)
Just find the citation on the web like at Open Library or somewhere, grab it, and add the book as an attachment.
I wouldn't drop it because all the stuff may not be done automatically. If you're going to read the books, you should be spending hours with them. I myself only put them into Zotero when I start reading them. I don't need to crowd it with wishful thinking. It's bloated and gets slower the more entries you add.
https://blog.mendeley.com/2025/07/09/mendeley-is-not-going-a...
I'm glad part of their stack is open source but I just wish they made it as easy as a compose file to run this on prem.
Personally, I used auto-export for all additional functionality. So, I didn't use any Word (LibreOffice) plugins that hooked into Zotero or whatever. I'd just consume a giant .bib file as and when necessary.
On modern hardware Zotero is probably fine. And it's reasonably flexible. A suggestion: export/import a big refs file (plus PDF attachments) and see if it can handle your daily workload. I suspect it will.
You might say it was just another excuse to curate my thousands of bookmarks and recreate a new tagging structure yet again, but… well, you wouldn‘t be wrong. :-)
