Zotero 7 released

Version 7 of the open source reference manager Zotero was released last Friday. Read the linked announcement for details, but the most excited feature for me is an improved built-in reader with ePub support.

Zotero allows you to store metadata and full-text publications and while PDF is the standard format for journal articles and preprints, books (and book chapters) are more commonly distributed as ePub files. The main advantages that ePub has over PDF are a) support for variable screen sizes including mobile phones, and b) a file format that remains editable. ePub - and the various readers and writers that support the format - is not perfect, and it will be interesting to see how the release of built-in ePub support in Zotero will change the adoption of ePub.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive uses markdown as the basic file format and then converts to PDF, ePub, and JATS XML using the Pandoc document converter library. In initial testing in early 2024 I found ePub and JATS to complicated to work with and not a good fit for science blog posts. The release of Zotero 7 will allow me to explore the different file formats for scholarly documents more, and possibly adapt the Rogue Scholar output options.

In the past 15 years I written repeatedly about Zotero, including an interview with Trevor Owens 2009, a webinar on writing Zotero translators with Sebastian Karcher in 2014, plus many blog post about the Citation Style Language and other reference managers. Zotero is an essential building block of my scholarly toolkit and I wish the team all the best for the release of version 7.

References

Fenner, M. (2009, March 4). Zotero: Interview with Trevor Owens. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/ftm7mbj-jpteh8h

Fenner, M. (2014, October 17). Webinar on Writing Zotero Translators. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw02