Lots of (smart!) people use RefWorks or EndNote to help them manage their citations and create bibliographies for assignments. You may have even attended an instructional session with your prof or at a library on how to use one of those. Thus, you may ask, “why bother using Zotero?” There are lots of great reasons:
- Zotero is free! You don’t have to pay a cent for it, and that also means you can keep using it once you leave UBC or whatever university has a subscription to one of the paid citation managers.
- It resides right on your Firefox browser and captures information from the Web.
- The interface is designed with you – the Web surfer – in mind. You can surf the Web and save items at the same time, without having to do complicated logins.
- Zotero allows you to tag, write notes and attach files to your items, drag and drop, mark up PDFs and web pages, and more.
- Finally, in my personal opinion, I find the user interface far easier and intuitive to use than some other citation managers!
The more you know about it, the more you’ll love using it.
What exactly is Zotero?
The name is loosely derived from an Albanian verb meaning “to master”. It was developed by some very smart people at George Mason University.
Zotero is an open source Firefox Add-on which can be easily installed on both your private computers and those in university labs. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. It allows you to collect, manage, and cite research from all types of sources. Zotero can “sense” the bibliographic information stored in webpages such as Amazon, Google Books, and Library catalogs (e.g. WorldCat or the UBC Library Catalogue). It also captures papers from Google Scholar or from subscription-based online databases, such as Web of Science or ABI/Inform. When you have all your sources collected, you can easily add notes, link to PDFs or full-text of resources, and generate bibliographies automatically in wikis, blogs, Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer.
Convinced? Read on to get started!
NetworkEducation
1. You first have to be using the Firefox browser, not IE, Chrome, or anything else. If you don’t already have it, go here to download Firefox from Mozilla. If you’re not willing to make the switch to Firefox, sorry, but Zotero won’t work on anything else! (however, their website indicates that future developments could include plugins for other browsers.)
2. Then go to www.zotero.org and download the Zotero add-on.
3. To learn how to use Zotero, it’s best to see it in action. Check out this screencast from Zotero.org, or check out this brief video from a librarian. Give it a try on your next paper!
Links to more advanced Zotero tools:
If you need to export citations in one batch from Zotero to Excel or another spreadsheet program: http://kimmonsdesign.com/node/24
Have more tips or how-to requests? Post them in the comments!
This lesson was created for the Digital Media Project, a joint project of UBC School of Library, Archival and Information Studies and the Irving K Barber Learning Centre. This post has been modified from its original form.