The iPad and iPhone are now ubiquitous in medical environments – for access to Clinical Decision Tools such as Uptodate, for quick-and-dirty Medline searches, but also as a convenient reader for journal articles that researchers have found from their Mac or PC, organised in a reference management tool, and forwarded to the iPad for reading and annotating in an app such as GoodReader.
One of the most versatile reference management tools, and an Open Source one, is Zotero which comes as a Firefox add-on, or a standalone package with browser plug-in. My hope was that Firefox for iOS would be fully compatible with all the Firefox plug-ins, so Zotero would come to iOS with the browser. Well, it’s not, sadly. And there doesn’t seem to be any information available at this stage if, and when, the wealth of add-ons that third-party developers have written for Firefox, will be ported onto the iOS version later.
The academic community would benefit considerably from a version of Zotero that runs on iOS phones and tablets. Imagine you could save the papers you happened to find while on a bus or at the dentist, to your bibliographic database! Let’s hope the integration of add-ons to iOS will become a reality soon…
Gerhard Bissels's Weblog 