Wednesday, August 26, 2009

No citation plugin for Mac in Mendeley => Using Zotero

Mendeley still doesn't have a Word plugin for making citations. I tried for a while to sort out Endnote X2 with word 2008 and gave up. I followed all the suggestions I could find in the Endnote help and the EndnoteX2 submenu in word still didn't appear.
Zotero to the rescue. I installed Zotero version 2.0b6.5 and and the Mac Plugin for word 2008 and hey presto, it works! It works fine so it will do for now and I might be converted.

4 comments:

Mr. Gunn said...

Thanks for giving Mendeley a shot.

The Mac side of things has gotten some improvements recently, and there's development on the Word plugin to begin soon.

Check back in a couple months or when you get sick of whatever you're using now. Mendeley can import your data so you won't lose anything.

Anonymous said...

The funniest part is that Mendeley copied Zotero's code to make its Word plugins, but they still can't seem to get Mac Word 2008 working. Go figure.

Victor said...

Dear Anonymous,

as Mr Gunn has pointed out, we haven't yet begun the development of the Word Plugin for Mac (there have only been preliminary investigations).

We cannot simply use the same code as for the Word/OO plugins, because those are written in VBA while the Mac one is written in Python. Moreover, it's also not as simple as just copying Zotero's code (I wish it was): We adapted parts of it to communicate with Mendeley Desktop's API, but had to rewrite other parts from scratch.

If you want to help us out, please feel free to do so: Our Word Plugins are licensed under the same Educational Community Open Source License as Zotero's.

Thanks!
Victor

victor.henning said...

Dear Anonymous,

as Mr Gunn has pointed out, we haven't yet begun the development of the Word Plugin for Mac (there have only been preliminary investigations).

We cannot simply use the same code as for the Word/OO plugins, because those are written in VBA while the Mac one is written in Python. Moreover, it's also not as simple as just copying Zotero's code (I wish it was): We adapted parts of it to communicate with Mendeley Desktop's API, but had to rewrite other parts from scratch.

If you want to help us out, please feel free to do so: Our Word Plugins are licensed under the same Educational Community Open Source License as Zotero's.

Thanks!
Victor

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