Improve interactions with Zotero: Automatic update, sharing, pull requests

[llorracc]

Econ-ARK has a Zotero account that is populated with a set of papers that we have used or cited in Econ-ARK projects. We would like:

1. To figure out how to make this usable to anyone who wants to import from it;
2. To figure out how to periodically auto-import from a bibfile at a url on the web;
3. To figure out how to make it really easy for people to propose to add papers to it
4. To have instructions for people to set up their anaconda installation so that when they open Jupyter notebooks locally, the links to our database will work
   • I think this is just a matter of setting up the right requirements.txt and notebook extensions

PS. This was formerly a subthread on #39 but is really a separate issue

[michiboo]

Hi I search on GOOGLE that there is a web API available for Zotero. You can see more detail on here:https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/web_api/v3/start, BTW I looking to apply GSOC with econ-ark, maybe this also can be one of the project?

[llorracc]

Thanks for pointing to the Zotero API, and am glad to hear you are interested in the GSOC Econ-ARK project.

This is not really part of what we had envisioned (our project proposal was about enabling GPUs to run some of our code), but it is definitely something that needs to be done. We've had a good bit of interest from GSOC people, and my understanding is that in such a case it is possible to create further projects, so we might do that. (Main constraint is bandwidth to write coherent project descriptions and then provide feedback).

PS. I briefly looked at the Zotero API, but concluded that it would take a good bit of work to construct the tools to do all these things. Handmade code is buggy and can break whenever Zotero changes the API or protocols for interacting with it, which is why we'd rather use somebody else's tools than write our own. It's surprising to me that, so far as I could tell when I wrote this (a year or two ago), none of these functions was available "off-the-shelf".

[michiboo]

@llorracc while I am writing my proposal for this, Can I put you as mentor?

[llorracc]

Sure!