Should I read academic papers in Zotero or Remnote?

Workflows and Education
#1

Hey guys,

I can’t decide whether to use Zotero or Remnote for reading academic papers.
On the one hand I would like to use as few programs as possible and I’m more likely to tag relevant rems if I make my notes in Remnote as I use Remnote for everything else like writing first drafts and taking notes in class. On the other hand Zotero is able to attach the actual page number of the journal (not just the page in the pdf) to my quotes and the process doesn’t interrupt my reading flow as much. Additionally, I will have to use Zotero eventually to insert quotations in my final Word document when writing essays.
I have seen Nabhan’s great video on conducting literature reviews but his process involves many different apps and is a bit too complicated for me.

How do you handle this problem? Would you recommend a two-step process, reading in Zotero and making an excerpt/summary in Remnote? I can’t be the only student struggling to manage my literature. :slight_smile:

Your input would be highly appreciated!

1 Like
#2

If I recall correctly, he also only uses Zotero+RemNote. The only tricky part is getting the metadata exported from Zotero to RemNote.

Ultimately, as long as you can easily match the rem with the paper (and any notes that reference it) in RemNote to the actual paper in Zotero, it really doesn’t matter where the paper itself resides. I’d suggest you try RemNote’s native PDF reader and compare it to Zotero’s, then decide based on that.

#3

And what about just using Zotero to store your papers using the same structure (folders) you have in RemNote?

You take notes in RemNote and you just use Zotero for citing in Word and Google Docs.

I’m also looking how to do this so if you have a different idea let me know!