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!