A tool to help you organize articles, web pages, photos, and other materials related to your research topics

General Forums
1

looking for software that can help me organize pretty much any information I have on a specific topic for my private research. This includes web pages, articles, and entire books (PDF/ePub), as well as images like photos of whiteboards and handwritten notes, screenshots, and my own texts. I might also want to include audio notes and videos down the line.

I’ve been using Zotero for a while and like it, but I’d prefer something self-hosted since I have a private Nextcloud instance and some web space. I also want to save snapshots of web pages, not just references to them, which Zotero does really well.

I tried JabRef, but it’s too focused on scientific research and doesn’t handle “unstructured” data like photos very well. Obsidian is another option, but it doesn’t work well with PDFs and eBooks—it can reference them but not include them in the dataset. I’d rather have everything in one place.

Since I do most of my reading on an Android tablet, it’s important that the software supports that platform. It would also be great if there were clients for Linux or Windows. I prefer open-source options whenever possible.

2

Try Logseq, or obsidian

3

Zotero is definitely the best tool I’ve come across for saving snapshots of web pages. You might already know that there are ways to self-host Zotero.

That said, I’ve also used Wjjsoft Mybase for years, which has a client-server version. It’s pretty powerful, but its webpage snapshot tool doesn’t compare to what Zotero offers.

4

thanks for the info! I’ll check it out. I knew about another Zotero server project that was abandoned a while back and relied on PHP5, but this one looks more up-to-date.

5

have you tried out Joplin?

6

I did not know it, just gave it a try. Looks promising, although the Web snapshots taken with the Web clipper are not as good as zotero. But aside from that, it looks good.