[westcort]

Let’s say you are working on a paper with 6 coauthors for a major medical journal, hypothetically. Dr. So and so in Russia, another in Japan, a third in California, and a few others. Would you mind reviewing this draft? Oh, yeah, by the way, you need to install Zotero before you can edit the references. How do you think that is going to go? How about dealing with a graphic designer in Hungary who can’t copy the text out of the document because there are weird hyperlinks that copy out with the references and don’t work with the InDesign. Oh, and the PM at DDB says the citation manager crashed and could you please resend the PDFs. I have worked with some big name journals and there are major interoperability issues that make this software undesirable for publishing in many scenarios.

[austinjp]

For what it's worth, I've seen the same sort of interoperability issues with all similar software. Author A wants "the latest copy of the Endnote file" but nobody's using Endnote; Author B insists on emailing PDFs as attachments and uses their email as their personal literature database; Author C has set up a Dropbox full of PDFs but nobody uses it; Author D has created a shared Google spreadsheet with links to each paper but it's always out of date; etc etc etc.

These aren't issues with any one piece of software, they're issues with coordination, as are the examples you mention.

[westcort]

Yes, I think that makes a lot of sense. Maybe the issues I am referring to are more to do with the general frustrations of putting together a paper with multiple authors and less to do with specific software.

[dr_dshiv]

This is why I just use Google docs and Google scholar... when i need to do the refs, I just alphabetize in a sheet. Frontiers has low barrier citation expectations. If I have to do ACM numbering I do it in word, as last step.

[westcort]

This is the way. Numbering should happen right before submission.

[BostonEnginerd]

I'm not really seeing it. In most of the workflows I've used, one person is responsible for maintaining most of the document including the bibliography. The other coauthors will add in notes requesting to add in a new item, etc.

Zotero is used primarily for managing the PDF library, the actual writing will happen in Word, LateX, etc. The reference list produced by Zotero is just text.

I don't see any real requirement that everyone working on a project would need to actually use Zotero, though I guess it would be handy to keep a coordinated shared library of papers.

[westcort]

Maybe I'm wrong and it is a very valuable tool I should be using. I just haven't seen it used in my industry over the past 2 decades. All I have heard about are major problems arising with use of this kind of software. Surely that experience has to count for something? I don't have any problem with others using it. I am just saying that when I submit a paper to a major journal, these kinds of tools generally are not used because of interoperability issues that inevitably come up when multiple people work on a project.