Endnote v. Zotero

From Thomson Reuters Lawsuit Dismissed blog post at The Quintessence of Ham:

I'm delighted to announce that this morning the Fairfax Circuit Court dismissed the lawsuit filed against Zotero by Thomson Reuters. The lawsuit had claimed that the Center for History and New Media "reverse-engineered" Thomson Reuters’s EndNote software to provide data interoperability between Zotero and EndNote.

I used EndNote at work around 1990 to manage our scientific references. I personally used EndNote in the early 1990s when I scored a free copy for being helpful in the right place at the right time. I loved it for bibliography management and formatting! I thought it could have stored more/better/any notes on each reference to help the writing process, but still very useful. At the same time, I was concerned about the company's ethics. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I wasn't sure I liked the company (I read the EULA). The fact that they filed this lawsuit helps me articulate my hesitation. Why should I be locked in to their format? Thank goodness for the web! You can use Zotero or RefWorks (not free, but I have a site license at work) or CiteULike or Connotea or Memento.

From those choices, I would recommend Zotero because it's very good as a bibliography manager (I don't need to create bibliographies now, so I don't have an opinion on that). It even includes the note taking features I wanted in EndNote years ago! It just makes sense to me to store the notes with the reference; that's what will help you (remember to) make the correct citation.

It's also a great note-taking tool for anything on the web, web notebook, web snapshot archiver, whatever you want to call this category. So you could probably use Zotero instead of another Firefox add-on like ScrapBook+ or even a service like Iterasi.

The beta version has sync. I'm not sure how I would use Zotero's Timeline support (maybe if you track news reports on certain topics?), but Timeline is very cool! Many plugins. It's impressive, and even more impressive that it doesn't feel bloated. [This sounds like a gush. Guess what? I don't use it often, but I'm glad it's there, and when I sync my Profile, I get my Zotero data too.] I guess the real drawback to Zotero is that it requires Firefox and I like Safari and Cruz too.

But my point is, I'm glad the big guy (EndNote, established software with corporate funding) didn't get to take out the little guy (Zotero, university project) this time.